Founders talk about the Series A crunch as a feeling. It’s arithmetic.
I mapped 1,503 US-headquartered early-stage investors for this one: 614 pre-seed and angel programs, 651 seed funds, and just 238 Series A firms. That last number is the whole story. For every fund that leads an A in America, roughly 5.3 investors are writing earlier checks, feeding companies toward a gate that half the country’s Series A capital guards from one state.
The geography is the part nobody prices in.
The Bay Area alone outnumbers all of New York City. San Francisco, Palo Alto, Menlo Park and the peninsula towns hold 394 investors against NYC’s 244. California and New York together account for 52% of the mapped list, and the Midwest, all twelve states of it, holds under 7%.
The surprise is Arizona. It ranks 4th nationally with 63 investors, ahead of Massachusetts at 56, driven almost entirely by pre-seed programs. At that stage, Phoenix outnumbers Boston. Then the funnel narrows and the map snaps back: at Series A, Massachusetts jumps to 3rd on biotech money, and 54% of the country’s A-stage firms sit in California. Illinois, the 4th-place state at that stage, has five.
Which leaves founders with a fact almost nobody plans around: where you raise your pre-seed and where you raise your A are different maps, and most people only ever look at one.
What’s inside
The database, and the system for working it:
All 1,503 investors across the three stage tabs: 614 pre-seed and angel (including 66 accelerators, 42 incubators, 19 labs, 8 studios and 17 university programs), 651 seed funds, 238 Series A firms
3,450 named partners and team members, with the deepest public teams mapped: a16z lists 98 people, Accel 61, Kleiner Perkins 51, Sequoia 42
Working websites for 96% of firms, plus city, state and region on every verified row
The stage-by-stage raising strategy the geography implies, including when to leave your city and when your city is actually the edge
The qualification pass that turns 1,503 rows into the 40 worth writing to
Your subscription also opens 10,000+ named investors across every list, the 375 Prompt Book for Fundraising, and 200+ pitch decks that raised.