The median company raised from three investors

The standard advice for raising money is a numbers game. Build a list of a hundred investors. Expect a 5% conversion. Run a tight process, create competitive tension, get to a term sheet.

The filings describe something else entirely.

We looked at 140 completed raises across 18 states — companies that filed a Form D and reported money actually sold, not just announced. The median number of investors was three.

The distribution

A quarter of these companies raised from a single investor. Sixty-two percent raised from five or fewer.

That is not a pipeline. That is a handful of conversations, and in a quarter of cases, one.

It is not just small rounds

The obvious objection is that these must be tiny raises where one friend wrote a cheque. Restricting to raises of $1,000,000 or more — 68 of them — the median is 8 investors, and 46% still closed with five or fewer.

Some specific ones, each with a filing behind it:

• Infinity Natural Resources (West Virginia) sold $350,000,000 to two investors, filed 6 March 2026 (0001193125-26-096492). The same company had sold $35,995,874 to five investors a month earlier (0001193125-26-033618).
• Baseten Labs (California) sold $1,096,448,855 to 41 investors against a $1,499,995,892 offering (0001865393-26-000004)
• SonoThera (California) sold $125,450,218 to 22 investors (0001945154-26-000002)

Two people funded a $350 million raise. Whatever process produced that, it was not a list of a hundred names and a 5% conversion rate.

What the typical cheque looked like

The median stated minimum investment was $25,000 in most states — the floor a company would accept, not what it received. Median implied cheque size, which is amount sold divided by the investor count on the same filing, ranged from about $100,000 to $530,000 depending on the state.

A $25,000 minimum with a median cheque in the hundreds of thousands says these are individuals and small funds writing meaningful cheques, not a crowd.

What this does and does not mean

It does not mean you will raise from three investors. It means that among companies that closed, most closed with very few — which changes what a raise is. Twenty warm conversations that produce three committed investors is not a failed process. On these numbers it is the normal one.

It also reframes what "no" costs. If the median round has three investors, each individual conversation carries far more weight than a conversion-rate model implies, and the work is depth rather than volume.

Where we are less certain, and why

Three things worth stating plainly.

The 140 raises are ones that closed. We ranked completed raises first, so this sample is drawn from companies that reported money sold. It tells you about rounds that finished, not about the ones that stalled.

The mean is 43 and the median is 3. That gap is not noise, it is a few outliers — including at least two pooled vehicles our filter failed to exclude, one of which reported 4,423 investors. Vehicles like that are a different animal from an operating company raising for itself, so the median is the honest statistic here and the mean would be misleading.

The offering and sold columns above are separate medians, not a per-company ratio. The median company did not necessarily sell 72% of its target; those are two distributions described side by side, and treating them as a ratio would be a claim the data does not support.

Look up your own state

The same report runs for wherever you are: the companies that actually raised, what they sold, how many investors bought, which exemption they used, and the accession number behind every figure.

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No account, nothing emailed, the report opens on the page.

Source: SEC Form D, Reg A and Reg CF filings, 18 months to August 2026, across 18 states. Investor counts are as reported on the filing. TyRey Technologies is not a broker-dealer, investment adviser or law firm, and nothing here is an offer, a recommendation, or investment advice.