How Many Seed Investors Are in the United States
The United States carries more seed-stage investors than any other country in the AngelMatch database: 20,000+ out of the more than 125,000 investors we track worldwide. That's not a coincidence. The US still runs the deepest, most liquid seed market anywhere, and most of the funds, syndicates, and platforms that back very early startups are headquartered here.
"Seed" on AngelMatch covers a wide range of check sizes and investor types, from solo angels writing $25,000 to $500,000 checks to venture capitalists leading rounds several times that size. If you're building an outreach list, pull the full investor database rather than working off this page alone, since the live table only shows a sample at a time.
Seed itself sits between pre-seed, where the check is usually smaller and the company is often pre-revenue, and early-stage venture, where investors expect a working product and real traction already. Most investors on this page look at a mix of those signals rather than a single metric, which is part of why the list spans everyone from a first-time angel to a fund that's been writing seed checks for a decade.
Where US Seed Investors Are Concentrated
California leads by a wide margin, followed by New York and Massachusetts, then Texas and Florida. That order isn't unique to AngelMatch's dataset. According to the NVCA's 2026 Yearbook, California alone pulled in roughly 60% of all US venture capital in 2025, about $191.2 billion, and California, New York, and Massachusetts together accounted for close to three-quarters of every dollar invested. The geography of where seed money actually lives lines up closely with the geography of where seed investors are tagged on AngelMatch.
On the city level, San Francisco and New York City carry the largest concentrations, with Los Angeles, Boston, and Austin rounding out the top five. The same NVCA report found that about 70% of new VC fund formation happens in just four metros: the Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, and Boston. If your startup is based in one of those cities, you're fundraising in the deepest part of the pool. If you're not, it's still worth reaching out to funds headquartered there, since most active seed investors invest well outside their home city.
Outside the top five states, seed investors are still spread across places like Washington, Illinois, Colorado, and Georgia, so a founder building in Denver or Atlanta isn't starting from zero. The concentration in California and New York mostly reflects where funds choose to headquarter their teams, not where every dollar they manage actually gets deployed.
What a Seed Round Looks Like in the US Right Now
Seed has changed shape over the past few years. The median seed pre-money valuation hit $16 million in 2025, up 78% from the 2021 peak, according to the NVCA's 2026 Yearbook. Pre-seed and seed rounds combined raised $22.3 billion across 5,049 deals in the US last year, and 14 individual seed or pre-seed deals closed above $100 million.
That last number matters more than it looks. A handful of "seed" rounds now look like what used to be a Series A, usually because an AI-focused startup raised a big check early. It doesn't mean every seed investor is suddenly writing eight-figure checks. Most of the 20,000+ investors on this page still write in the standard range for the stage: angels typically between $25,000 and $500,000, seed-focused funds usually a few million more than that. The lesson for your outreach list is simple. Don't assume a fund's headline deal tells you what they'll write for you. Look at their normal check size, not their biggest one.
That pricing shift changes the dilution math too. A company raising the same dollar amount at a higher valuation gives up less equity for it, which is part of why knowing your own specific numbers matters more now than it did when seed rounds were smaller and more uniform in size.
How AI Is Reshaping Even Seed-Stage Pricing
Across the entire 2025 US venture market, not just seed, AI-related deals captured roughly two-thirds of the dollars invested, according to the NVCA's 2026 Yearbook. That's an economy-wide number, not a seed-specific one, but the effect still shows up at seed. When an AI-focused startup with early traction raises, it tends to draw a crowd and get priced accordingly. A comparable non-AI startup at the same stage usually doesn't see that same competition for the round.
That's not a reason to bolt an AI narrative onto a company that isn't one. It's a reason to expect the valuation conversation to be shaped by what category an investor thinks you're in, fairly or not, and to be ready to explain clearly why your traction stands on its own regardless of category.
Who's Writing Seed Checks in the US
Angel/individual investors make up the largest single group tagged to US seed deals, at 13,000+, followed by venture capitalists at 11,000+. Private equity investors, investment partners, and micro VCs make up most of the rest. On AngelMatch, the "private equity firm" tag is applied to individual investors rather than firms, so treat it as a person's profile, not a fund's, when you're reading through the list.
That mix means outreach shouldn't look the same for every name on your list. An angel is usually deciding alone and moving fast. A partner at a venture fund is bringing your deck into a partner meeting and needs a tighter story on market size and traction before they'll champion it internally. Segment your list by investor type before you write a single email, not after.
Micro VCs, which on AngelMatch usually means smaller, often newer funds, tend to move faster than larger multi-stage firms and can be a good first stop before you approach a fund that will want to see more traction before it commits.
What Founders Should Know Before Reaching Out
US seed investors mostly follow the same calendar founders complain about every year. Deal flow slows down in August, when a lot of partners are out, and again in the two weeks around the December holidays. If you can, get your first round of outreach out between January and June, or right after Labor Day, when inboxes are lighter on "circling back" emails.
Demo days tied to the major accelerator batches also cluster investor attention, which can work for you or against you depending on timing. If you're not part of a batch, a warm intro from a founder an investor has already backed tends to cut through a crowded inbox faster than a cold email ever will.
Expect to give up somewhere between 15% and 25% of your company in a typical seed round. That's a wide range, and where you land depends on your valuation, how much you're raising, and how much competition there is for the deal. Running the numbers with a pre-money and post-money valuation calculator before your first call means you walk in knowing what a given check size actually costs you in equity.
With 20,000+ seed investors tagged to the United States and new ones added as the database grows, the hard part isn't finding names, it's building a list scoped tightly enough to actually work through. Start with the states and cities where you're most likely to find a warm path in, investors nearest to you tend to move fastest, and widen from there. A fundraising CRM makes it easier to track who's replied and who's still waiting to hear from you as that list grows past a handful of names.
Seed investors
