Bay Area Captures 45% of U.S. Seed Funding in 2025 as Capital Concentrates

U.S. seed investment is surging, but the benefits are not spreading evenly across startup hubs. Crunchbase data shows that capital is concentrating in the San Francisco Bay Area, which captured 45 percent of U.S. seed funding in 2025, up sharply from 33 percent in 2024 and 28 percent in 2023. The New York area has remained relatively steady as a seed funding center at around 17 percent of dollars. Greater Los Angeles and Greater Boston each accounted for about 5 percent of total funding. Startups outside the top four metro areas represented just 28 percent of U.S. seed funding in 2025, the lowest share on record and well below the 40 percent average seen from 2018 through 2024. Despite the dollar concentration, two-thirds of U.S. seed-stage startups in 2025 were based outside the Bay Area. A long tail of smaller ecosystems, including Austin, Seattle, Miami, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Denver, and San Diego, continues to produce new companies. Deal counts are also concentrating. The Bay Area alone accounted for roughly one-third of all U.S. seed rounds in 2025, up five percentage points from the prior year. Taken together, the four leading metro areas made up 57 percent of U.S. seed deals. Median seed round sizes in 2025 were actually higher in other major hubs, including New York, Boston, and Los Angeles, than in the Bay Area, which has seen typical deal sizes shrink since the market peak. When rounds of $10 million or more are excluded, the top four markets account for about 61 percent of seed funding amounts, closer to historical norms.