What is pre-seed funding? Cheque sizes, investors and how it works in Europe
Pre-seed funding is the first outside capital a startup raises to prove the team and the problem - here is what European rounds look like, who writes the cheques, and how long the money should last.
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Pre-seed funding is the first outside capital a startup raises – usually from angels, specialist pre-seed funds and grant programmes – to prove that the team is credible and the problem is real, before there is much evidence anyone will pay.
That is the honest version. The folklore version – pre-seed as a tiny cheque scraped together from friends and family – is out of date here in Europe. Across the rounds Sesamers tracks, the median pre-seed round is €1.6M (n=33), with cheques starting from around €424k. Pre-seed has grown into an institutional stage with its own funds, its own diligence habits and its own failure modes. Below, I lay out what the stage is actually for, who writes the cheques, what those investors check, and how long the money should last.
What pre-seed funding actually proves
Every funding stage exists to retire a specific risk. At pre-seed, the risk being priced is not revenue risk or scaling risk – it is whether you and your co-founders can find a real problem and move fast enough to matter. You are typically raising with a prototype, a waitlist, a handful of design partners, or sometimes nothing but a well-argued thesis and a track record.
That changes the bar. Nobody serious expects a pre-seed company to show retention curves or unit economics. What they do expect is evidence that you understand the problem better than the market does, and that you ship and learn quickly. A pre-seed investor is underwriting a team and a problem, not a business.
The corollary is uncomfortable but worth stating plainly: if you already have paying customers and repeatable demand, you may be underselling yourself by raising a pre-seed at all. Stages are defined by what is proven, not by how much you raise – a distinction covered at length in our guide to what a startup actually is.
How much is a pre-seed round in Europe?
Across the rounds Sesamers tracks, the median European pre-seed is €1.6M, from a sample of 33 rounds, with the smallest cheques from around €424k. I am not telling you to aim for that number – treat it as a marker, not a rule. The spread around it is wide, and a sample of tracked, announced rounds skews towards the larger, louder end of the market. Plenty of real pre-seeds – a single angel cheque, a grant plus a small syndicate – never get announced at all.
Rounds are also drifting upwards across the board. Bloomberg reported in March 2026 that the median European round size grew 32% from 2024 to 2025, driven substantially by US capital moving into European deals. The money crossing the Atlantic now arrives this early. What was a seed-sized cheque five years ago is a pre-seed cheque now, which is part of why the stage labels have become so slippery.
For context on where the stage sits: the seed median across the rounds Sesamers tracks is €5M (n=74), roughly three times the pre-seed figure. That gap is the clearest signal of what each stage is for. Pre-seed buys the experiments. Seed buys the evidence.
Who writes pre-seed cheques
The European pre-seed capital stack has three main layers, and most rounds we see mix at least two of them.
| Source | What they bring | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Angels and operator syndicates | Fast decisions, relevant scar tissue, intros; often the first believers | Cheques are small individually – you may need many, which multiplies admin and cap-table clutter |
| Pre-seed and micro funds | Institutional process, follow-on reserves, signalling for the seed | They run real diligence; a fund passing can be read as signal by others |
| Grants and public programmes | Non-dilutive money – no equity sold at your cheapest-ever price | Slow timelines, reporting overhead, and grant milestones can distort roadmaps |
| Accelerators and incubators | Capital plus structure, cohort, and demo-day access | Standardised terms; check what the equity actually buys beyond the cheque |
The reality: equity sold at pre-seed is the most expensive equity you will ever sell, so every dilutive cheque in that table costs you more than the same cheque would at any later stage. The silver lining: this is one of the rare corners of startup life where Europe genuinely spoils you – grants and public programmes offer non-dilutive money at exactly the moment your equity is cheapest, and a grant that replaces even part of the round has an outsized effect on what you keep. We map the landscape in our guide to European startup grants. The opportunity: build the round deliberately from at least two layers rather than taking whatever arrives first. Accelerators are a legitimate route too, with the usual caveat that the good ones are worth the equity and many of the rest are not; see our overview of European accelerators and incubators.
The instruments: SAFEs, convertibles and BSA-AIR
Most European pre-seeds are not priced rounds. They use deferred-pricing instruments instead: the SAFE (dominant in anglophone markets and increasingly everywhere), the convertible loan note (common in Germany and the Nordics), and the BSA-AIR (the French adaptation). Three names, three legal traditions, one job – we call ourselves a single market, but we do like to keep our paperwork local. All three work the same way: money in now, price set later, usually at the seed round, with a valuation cap and sometimes a discount protecting the early investor.
The practical advantages are speed and cost: no full valuation negotiation, lighter legal work, and the ability to close investors one at a time rather than choreographing a single close. The practical danger is stacking – layering multiple instruments at different caps and forgetting that they all convert into equity at once, at the seed. We keep making this mistake, and the surprise on the cap table arrives at exactly the wrong moment. The mechanics, differences and traps are covered properly in our guide to SAFEs, convertibles and BSA-AIR.
What pre-seed investors actually check
So what gets diligenced when there is barely a business to diligence? You do. In practice that means a few recurring questions:
- Why this team? Founder-problem fit is the single most examined item. Investors want a reason you specifically win: domain depth, distribution access, technical edge, or an earned insight others have missed.
- How fast do you ship? Speed of iteration is the best observable proxy for everything else. What did you build and learn in the last eight weeks is a more revealing question than any slide.
- Is the problem real and painful? Evidence of pull – a waitlist that converts, design partners who chase you, users who complain when the prototype breaks – beats market-size arithmetic every time.
- Can this become big? Not proof, but a plausible route. Pre-seed investors need the outcome, if everything works, to be large enough to matter for their fund.
- Is the cap table clean? Dead equity – a departed co-founder holding 30%, an advisor on 5% – kills more early rounds than founders expect.
Notice what is missing: revenue targets, CAC/LTV ratios, five-year forecasts. Sophisticated pre-seed investors know the numbers in a pre-seed model are fiction; what they read from the model is how you think.
Pre-seed vs seed: where the line actually is
The line is blurry and always has been. But the useful distinction is about proof, not amounts.
| Pre-seed | Seed | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are proving | Team is credible, problem is real | Someone pays, and repeatably |
| Median (rounds Sesamers tracks) | €1.6M (n=33) | €5M (n=74) |
| Typical evidence | Prototype, design partners, waitlist | Early revenue or engaged usage, first hints of repeatability |
| Typical instrument | SAFE / convertible / BSA-AIR | More often a priced equity round |
| Typical lead | Angels, micro funds | Institutional seed funds |
If you can show repeatable willingness to pay, you are seed-stage regardless of what the round is called. If you cannot, calling your round a seed does not make it one – it just imports seed-stage expectations you cannot yet meet. The full picture of the next stage is in our guide to what a seed round is.
How long should pre-seed money last?
The standard rule of thumb – and it is a rule of thumb, not a statistic – is that a pre-seed should buy 12-18 months of runway: enough time to run the experiments that get you to seed-stage evidence, plus the raise itself. Fundraising typically takes three to six months as a working assumption, and you want to start the seed process with at least nine months of runway remaining. Negotiating with an emptying bank account is how bad terms happen.
Work backwards from that. If your monthly burn is €60k, a €1.2M round buys about 20 months on paper, but hiring plans have a way of compressing runway faster than the spreadsheet suggests. Remember: the discipline that matters is not the size of the round but the clarity about what the money must prove before it runs out.
The goal was never to raise the biggest pre-seed in your cohort, or to hit the median because the median exists. The goal is to buy enough time to prove that your team is credible and your problem is real, on terms that leave you owning the company you are building. Raise for the proof, not for the headline – then go build!
Frequently asked questions
How much pre-seed funding should I raise?
Enough to fund 12-18 months of the experiments that produce seed-stage evidence, plus a fundraising buffer – a rule of thumb, not a law. The European median is €1.6M across the rounds Sesamers tracks, but the right number for you comes from your burn and your milestones, not from the median.
Do I need revenue to raise a pre-seed round?
No. Pre-seed exists precisely for the stage before revenue. What you need is credible evidence of founder-problem fit and demonstrable speed. Revenue helps, but investors know pre-seed revenue is often noise; a few pilots at €500 a month prove less than most founders hope.
Do VCs invest at pre-seed in Europe?
Yes – a dedicated layer of pre-seed and micro funds now leads European rounds at this stage, alongside some multi-stage funds writing small early cheques to buy an option on the seed. The trade-off with multi-stage money is signalling: if they do not follow on, other investors will ask why.
What comes after pre-seed?
Seed – typically 12-24 months later, once you can show that someone pays for the product and that the buying is starting to repeat. Across the rounds Sesamers tracks, that step up is roughly €1.6M to €5M at the median.
Keep going
Start with the foundations in what is a startup, then get tactical with how to raise a pre-seed in Europe, understand the paperwork in SAFEs, convertibles and BSA-AIR, and see what the next stage demands in what is a seed round. For live numbers by stage, see our funding-by-stage hub.
