How Much Should a Startup Raise?

"How much are you raising?" is the second question an investor asks and the one founders answer worst. The weak answers come in two shapes: a number with no reasoning behind it, and a range so wide it reveals there is no plan. Both tell an experienced investor the same thing.

Raise for a milestone, not for a runway

Runway is a consequence, not a target. The question is what the next round requires you to have proven, and what that proof costs.

So work backwards. If a seed round in your category needs roughly €40–50K MRR and you are at €12K, your pre-seed has to fund the team, time and spend that closes that gap — plus the months of fundraising itself, which founders almost always forget to fund.

Calculating the number

1. Define the milestone in one measurable sentence. "€45K MRR with under 3% monthly churn," not "product-market fit."
2. Cost the plan that gets there. Hires with real start dates, salaries with employer costs, the marketing spend the growth assumption requires, tooling, and whatever your regulatory or certification path costs.
3. Add the months to reach it, honestly. Take your team's estimate and extend it, because your estimate is the best case.
4. Add fundraising time — four to six months at the end.
5. Add a buffer of 20–30%. Something will cost more or take longer.
6. Subtract expected revenue, discounted. If the plan depends on revenue that has not happened, that is not runway, it is hope.

The output is usually 18 to 24 months of runway. Below 18, you are raising again before the milestone lands. Above 30, you are usually solving for comfort and paying for it in dilution.

The dilution check

Now sanity-check the number against ownership, because a round you can justify operationally can still be a bad idea structurally.

Stage	Typical dilution	Implication
Pre-seed	10–20%	Plus option pool, often at the investor's request
Seed	15–25%	Where founders most often over-dilute
Series A	15–25%	Board composition starts to matter more than the percentage

If your round only works at 35% dilution, you are either raising too much for your current traction or accepting a valuation that will make the next round hard. Both are fixable now and expensive later. Investors do their own version of this arithmetic: a cap table where founders hold too little after seed reads as a company that will struggle to motivate its own team through Series B.

Raising too little

The common failure, and the more dangerous one. You hit month fourteen with a metric that is better but not better enough, and you go back to market with a story that says the plan worked partially. Bridge rounds at flat or reduced valuations follow, and they are far more damaging to a cap table than the extra €200K you declined to raise would have been.

Raising too much

Less common, still real. Three costs: dilution you did not need; a valuation you now have to grow into, which turns a good company into a disappointing investment on paper; and the discipline problem — capital tends to be spent, and headcount added before a repeatable motion exists is the most expensive mistake in early-stage B2B.

What to tell investors

Give one number and a narrow band around it: "We are raising €800K, with room to €1M if we add a strategic angel." Then, unprompted, give the milestone it buys and the runway it produces. Three sentences.

The number is not the answer. The reasoning behind the number is the answer, and it is the part investors are actually evaluating.

Expect to be asked what you would do with half. Have a real answer — which hire survives, which market you cut. Founders who cannot answer signal that the plan is one indivisible bet, and investors discount indivisible bets.

European reference points

Rough Central and Eastern European early-stage ranges, useful as sanity checks rather than targets:

• Pre-seed: €300K–€1M. Buys a small team and a first repeatable sales motion.
• Seed: €1M–€3M. Buys the go-to-market engine, not the first proof of it.
• Series A: €4M+. Buys scaling of something already known to work.

Grant and non-dilutive funding is genuinely useful here and widely underused — it can extend runway by months without touching the cap table, though it rarely arrives on the timeline you want.

If you want to pressure-test your own number, put your real costs and timeline into it and see what the round has to be. That arithmetic is usually more persuasive than anything you will put in the deck.