Raising Pre-seed and Seed in Central and Eastern Europe in 2026: Round Sizes, Who Writes the Cheques and the Series A Gap

If you are building a startup in Warsaw, Prague, Tallinn, Sofia or Kyiv, most fundraising advice you read was written for San Francisco or London. The numbers in it are wrong for you: the round sizes, the number of funds, how long a round has to last. This guide uses data on Central and Eastern European (CEE) startups and funds to answer three practical questions: how much a first round usually is, who writes the cheque at each stage, and what it takes to reach Series A.

The pool is small, and it is concentrated

Start with the size of the market. In 2025, 200 CEE companies received venture capital — 4.1% of all European companies that received VC that year (Invest Europe, 2025). The average investment per company was EUR 3.38M in CEE against EUR 4.08M across Europe.

The money is not spread evenly. The five largest recipient countries took 85% of CEE venture capital by value. Poland alone accounted for 29% of the companies backed and 46% of the value (Invest Europe, 2025). If you are outside the top five, expect a thinner local investor base and plan to pitch across borders from the first round.

Most of the money also goes to later stages. Later-stage deals took 65% of CEE venture value in 2025, while seed took 3.5% of total private equity investment value in the region (Invest Europe, 2025). Only 77 CEE companies got seed-stage venture capital from the funds Invest Europe tracks, at an average of EUR 1.173M each.

That average has grown fast. In 2020 it was EUR 0.313M per company (Invest Europe). By our calculation from those two figures, the average seed cheque per company is about 3.7 times larger than five years ago. Fewer companies get more money each.

What a round actually looks like

Invest Europe reports averages per company per year, not round sizes. For round sizes you need deal trackers, which count rounds whose amount was made public. One regional tracker (Bad Ideas Fund, January–September 2026) gives the following medians for closed rounds of CEE startups:

• Pre-seed: median EUR 380K; the top quarter of rounds start at EUR 500K.
• Seed: median EUR 2M; the bottom quarter is at or below EUR 1.4M, the top quarter starts at EUR 3.1M.
• Series A: median EUR 7.1M; the top quarter starts at EUR 13.8M.

For comparison, the median European seed deal was $2.4M in 2025 (KPMG Venture Pulse, PitchBook data) and the median US seed deal was $3.0M in the first nine months of 2026 (PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor). A CEE seed round is not tiny next to Europe. The gap shows at Series A.

What founders ask for is close to what closes. Founders from CEE applying to the same fund asked for a median pre-seed of EUR 400K, and 43% asked for EUR 300K or less. Founders from outside CEE applying to that fund asked for a median EUR 580K (Bad Ideas Fund, 2026). By our calculation that is 45% more. CEE founders tend to ask for less, and the market tends to give them about what they ask.

The traction bar is lower than many founders assume. 70% of CEE founders raising pre-seed in that applicant pool had no revenue. At seed, only 23% had EUR 100K or more in annual recurring revenue, and those with revenue had a median ARR of EUR 160K (Bad Ideas Fund, 2026). Poland's own startup census points the same way: 23% of Polish startups generate no revenue, and 52% have raised less than PLN 100K in external funding in total (gov.pl, 2024). Only 9% have raised more than PLN 5M.

Who writes the cheque changes between seed and Series A

This is the most important pattern in the data for planning.

First cheques are local. Of the ten most active pre-seed and seed investors in CEE over 2021–2026, 90% are based in the region (Dealroom). Behind those funds sits a lot of public money. Government and multilateral agencies provided 37% of the capital raised by CEE venture funds in 2025, and private individuals another 22% (Invest Europe, 2025). In total, CEE venture funds raised EUR 548M that year.

Series A is increasingly foreign. In January–September 2026, 88% of CEE Series A rounds with known investors included a fund based outside CEE — 21 of 24 rounds (Bad Ideas Fund). In Romania in 2025, 65% of rounds of any stage had an investor from outside the region. Over the same nine months, CEE startups closed 29 Series A rounds, against 40 a year earlier. By our calculation that is about 27% fewer. Together they raised EUR 360M.

So you raise pre-seed and seed from local funds, often backed by public money, and then Series A from an investor in Western Europe or the US. You are selling to two different buyers. They want different things, and you should plan for the second one from the start.

How many get through

Reaching the next round is the bottleneck. Across CEE, 19% of funded startups progressed from pre-seed to seed and 20% from seed to Series A (Dealroom, data as of October 2026). The city rates differ a lot: seed-to-Series A is 30% in Warsaw, 29% in Sofia and 14% in Prague (Dealroom city pages).

It also takes time. One deal tracker puts the median time from a pre-seed or seed round to the next round at 642.5 days for Polish startups and 440 days for Estonian ones (tech.eu Funding, 2019–2025). Europe-wide, the median time from seed to Series A was 24 months for the 2016–2018 seed cohorts (Dealroom). The top quarter of CEE seed rounds is planned to last 21 months or more (Bad Ideas Fund, 2026).

What this means for your plan

Size the seed for the real gap to the next round. In Poland the median gap is 642.5 days — about 21 months by our calculation — and Europe-wide it is 24 months from seed to Series A. A seed of about EUR 2M has to cover that whole gap. If your plan assumes you raise again within a year, you are planning on being an outlier.

Build for the Series A investor from day one. If nearly nine in ten Series A rounds include a foreign fund, you will be checked against Western standards: audited numbers, an English data room, a clean cap table, a holding structure foreign funds can invest in, and revenue that is not limited to one small home market. Fixing these at Series A costs months you do not have.

Treat public money as an asset with conditions. A large share of local seed funding comes through funds backed by government and multilateral agencies. That money often comes with rules on where the company is registered, where staff are hired and how fast it can move abroad. Read those terms with your next round in mind, not just this one.

Do not under-ask out of habit. CEE founders in the same applicant pool asked for less than founders from outside the region. Work out what it costs to reach the milestones a seed investor will pay for, ask for that amount, and show the arithmetic.

Pick your city's funnel. A seed-to-Series A rate of 30% in Warsaw against 14% in Prague is a real difference in your odds. If you are in a thin market, plan to raise across borders early. Do not treat it as a last resort.

What the data does not tell you

• Deal trackers only see disclosed rounds. Bad Ideas Fund and tech.eu medians come from rounds whose amounts were made public, with small samples per country. Treat them as a planning range, not a census.
• Invest Europe measures funds, not startups. Its figures cover investments by the private equity and venture funds it tracks, as averages per company per year. They are not round sizes and do not include angels or most foreign funds investing directly.
• The applicant-pool numbers describe one fund's pipeline. The ask sizes, revenue at raise and runway come from founders applying to a single CEE pre-seed fund. That is a useful signal of founder behaviour, not the whole market.
• Graduation rates have no stated window. Dealroom's progression rates are snapshots, not cohort studies with a fixed 24- or 36-month window, so they do not compare directly with US or Western European graduation rates.
• 2026 is nine months, not a year. The fall in Series A rounds compares January–September of each year. A strong fourth quarter could narrow it.

The pattern holds across the sources: first rounds in CEE are closer to European sizes than most founders think, the next round is slower and less likely, and the Series A cheque increasingly comes from outside the region. Plan the seed so it lasts until the foreign investor is ready to say yes.