Ask five VCs what "seed stage" means and you'll get six different answers. That's not a joke. The term has been stretched in every direction over the last decade—applied to companies raising $500K on a cocktail napkin pitch and to companies raising $5M with three years of revenue. Both call it seed. Both are wrong, at least from where we sit.
We've been doing this since 2019, and one thing we've learned is that the word matters less than the underlying reality. Founders waste months pitching the wrong investors because they're optimizing for a label instead of asking whether a given fund actually invests at their stage of company. So here's our honest take on what seed means, how it's changed, and where things stand heading into 2026.
The Definitional Drift
Ten years ago, seed meant pre-product. You had an idea, maybe a prototype, definitely no revenue. Angels and small seed funds wrote checks of $250K–$750K to help you figure out if the thing was even buildable. Series A was when you proved it worked. Series B was when you scaled it.
That progression got compressed. Then it got muddied. By 2021 and 2022, "seed rounds" were routinely hitting $10M+, led by major firms who were essentially doing early Series A work but calling it seed because the company hadn't raised an official A yet. Meanwhile, the companies actually at the earliest stages—pre-product, pre-revenue, sometimes pre-team—needed a different category. Pre-seed emerged to fill that gap.
Now we have pre-seed, seed, post-seed, and "extended seed" all floating around. Helpful, right?
What We Actually Mean When We Say Seed
At Inprimio, seed means this: you've validated that the problem is real, you have evidence that at least some customers want what you're building, and you're raising to accelerate toward product-market fit. You might have early revenue. You might not. What matters is that you're past the pure hypothesis stage.
Pre-seed, by contrast, means you have the idea, the founding team, and a thesis—but you're still building toward that initial validation. That's also something we fund. Roughly 40% of our portfolio came in at the pre-seed stage.
We don't have a hard revenue threshold because that would be stupid. A SaaS company doing $8K MRR at six months old is probably more fundable to us than a marketplace that did $400K GMV in its first year but has economics that don't work. Context matters.
Why This Matters for Your Fundraise
The practical implication is that when you're building your target list of investors, the stage label is a starting point, not an answer. You need to look at the actual check sizes a fund has written, the stage of the companies in their portfolio at the time of investment, and whether they've done follow-on into later rounds.
A fund's website might say "seed stage" but if their portfolio shows 12 companies that all had $1M+ ARR at the time of investment, that's not your fund.
Our check sizes run $250K to $1M. The lower end of that range is pre-seed. The upper end is seed. In a handful of cases we've participated in small bridge rounds for companies we've already backed. We don't lead every deal, and we don't expect to. What we do expect is that when we write a check, we're one of the first institutional money in.
The 2026 Landscape
The funding market has rationalized since the 2021–2022 peak. Seed rounds that would have closed in two weeks during that era are now taking three to five months. Valuations have come down from the absurd highs. That's actually good for founders who aren't in a rush—it means investors are paying attention again, doing real diligence, and making commitments they intend to support long-term.
We're seeing more deals that make sense in 2026 than we saw in 2021. The froth is gone. What's left are founders who are building because they believe in the problem, not because they're chasing a market moment.
That's the kind of founder we've always backed. So in a weird way, the market cleanup has been good for us.
What This Means If You're Pitching Us
Come to us when you're at the beginning. Not when you've already proven everything and are shopping a growth round. We want to be the check that helps you get from "this is real" to "this is working." That's the window where we think we can add the most value—and frankly, where we do our best work.
If you're not sure whether you're at the right stage for us, email us anyway. We'll tell you honestly. [email protected]. We read every email.
