Building a startup has become much cheaper. That is changing what early-stage venture money is for, and it is changing the investor's job.
Over the past few weeks I have had the same conversation with founders, operators and fund managers from different startup ecosystems, in the Caucasus, Central Asia and the GCC and beyond. The details differ. The pattern does not.
Smaller teams, further
The first part is the team. A small group can now get to a working product with AI doing a large share of the work.
The data shows it. Carta's Solo Founders Report found that the share of new US startups with a single founder rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% in the first half of 2025. Teams that do raise are smaller too. Citing Carta's Peter Walker, Sierra Ventures reports that average seed-stage team size fell 39% since 2021, from 10.3 employees to 6.2.
The extreme cases are extreme. Lovable passed $100M in annual recurring revenue 8 months after launch, with 45 full-time employees. Most companies will never look like that. But the direction is clear: fewer people, further, before the first real round.
Infrastructure, partly covered
The second part is infrastructure. Cloud and AI providers now cover a good share of it through startup programs:
- Google for Startups Cloud Program: up to $350,000 in Google Cloud credits over 2 years for AI startups.
- AWS Activate: up to $200,000 for pre-Series B startups referred by an accelerator or investor, and $1,000 to $5,000 for self-funded founders.
- Microsoft for Startups: up to $150,000 in Azure credits, unlocked as usage grows.
The fine print matters. The biggest tiers usually need an accelerator, an investor or a VC round behind you. A bootstrapped founder starts with a few thousand dollars. Still, for a software company, a few hundred thousand dollars of compute and models is months of runway that used to come from the first cheque.
Put the 2 together and a founder can get much further on little money. Further into product, and often into first customers.
So what is the money for?
When the first version no longer needs a funding round, venture money moves to 2 other jobs.
1. Growth once something works. The company has customers and a reason to hire. Money buys speed: sales, distribution, new markets. This is where round sizes and valuations are going. Carta's July 2026 benchmarks put the median seed round for software companies at $4.1M on a $24.3M valuation. At the top end, 95th percentile seed valuations reached $200.4M in Q2 2026, up from $72.2M a year earlier.
2. Truly new work that cannot run on credits. Hardware, biotech, energy, anything that needs labs, factories or long research cycles. Credits do not pay for a clean room. Carta's State of Pre-Seed 2025 shows hardware and biotech/pharma finished 2025 as the second and third largest pre-seed industries by cash raised, up from third and fifth in 2024.
What gets less money is the middle: the round that exists only to fund a first version a small team could now build anyway.
Fewer rounds, bigger cheques
The money is concentrating. In 2025, US startups on Carta raised $10.4B across 50,316 SAFEs and convertible notes. Total cash fell 1% from 2024. The number of instruments fell 13%.
The same thing is happening at the top of the market. Peter Walker wrote in July that seed and Series A valuations have never been higher, but unlike prior booms, fewer rounds are being completed. PitchBook and NVCA count $515.8B in US deal value through Q3 2026, with AI taking a record 82.7% of it.
More money into fewer companies, later.
Why a big early pipeline matters less
This shifts the investor's job.
For years, early-stage investing rewarded volume. See more decks, take more first calls, run a bigger funnel. That still matters, but less. Many of the best companies are not in anyone's pipeline yet. They are building quietly, finding their first customers, and will raise when they are ready to grow.
By the time they show up, they have revenue, options and a short list of investors they already know. The fund that meets them on the day they open a round is competing on price. The fund that knew them 6 months earlier is competing on trust.
At Seeder we see the same thing from the inbound side. The companies that are easiest to find are not always the ones worth finding.
What this means
For founders: apply to the credit programs early, before you need them. They are the cheapest runway you will get. Then raise when money buys speed, not when it buys time.
For investors: the work moves earlier and gets quieter. Know the builders before they are fundraising. Show up in the communities, programs and products where they work. Be useful before there is a deal.
The best early companies are not looking for investors yet. Finding them anyway is the job now.
