Joining the exclusive club of one-percenters is hard, and, by definition, nearly every company fails to gain entry. For founders and investors alike, the..
Today, we are finding out how much money a startup needs to raise to be counted among the best-capitalized new companies in its home state.
Why bother with this? Because for states not on the coasts, the exercise gives local entrepreneurs and outside observers a benchmark for evaluating where a company sits on a state’s spectrum of startup companies.
We’ ll start at the national level before we dive into individual states and their nuances.
To answer our question, we aggregated pre-IPO venture capital and venture debt deal data from around 24,600 companies that meet the following criteria:
We’ re going to find out what it takes for a company to be at or above certain positions on the startup funding curve. So how much money does a startup need to raise to be in the upper half of U. S. startups in terms of the amount of money raised? To show this, we made a chart plotting the total amount of money raised that corresponds to different percentiles, from zero through one hundred.
And here’s a table that shows the corresponding amounts of total startup funding for key points of interest on the graph above.
The curve above may illustrate the national rankings, but what about on a state-by-state level?
It’s probably unfair to stack companies based in states with comparatively smaller tech startup ecosystems against, say, New York or California. Well, founders from Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska and Iowa, you’ re in luck. We crunched the numbers for all 50 states in the union, plus the District of Columbia.
In the map below (interactive version here) , you’ ll be able to see the cut-off point for joining the top 50 percent of companies in your state, ranked by total funds raised to date.
It won’ t be a shock that certain states have higher median (which is a fancy way of saying the 50th percentile) funding amounts than others. States like California, Texas, New York, Massachusetts and others with relatively high levels of startup activity are more likely to have higher median funding values than those with less startup activity.
That should strike most as fairly obvious, but what’s interesting about this map is that, ultimately, there’s a relatively narrow range of funding levels that land companies in the top half of startups in their states.
Notwithstanding outliers like Hawaii, where the median funding amount is $75,000 in our data set, raising between $500,000 and $2 million is enough to join the top half of companies in many states. During a time where multi-million-dollar seed rounds happen with surprising regularity on the coasts, one might be surprised to learn that raising just $1 million is enough to rank in the top half of companies in 28 states.
In other words, there’s a fairly low barrier to entering the top half of startups — especially outside of the coasts.
But what about the top 1 percent of startups in each state? Here we have another map (interactive version here) :
