🌱 Every mighty oak tree starts from a tiny seed!

And many successful startups begin with seed capital 💰

Seed capital is the first money that a startup raises to get off the ground 🚀

It's used to fund early expenses like product development, validating their idea, and hiring a small team 👨‍💻

Startups usually raise seed capital from three main sources:

1️⃣ Angel investors are wealthy individuals who invest their own money into startups 😇

Many angel investors are successful entrepreneurs themselves!

2️⃣ Friends and family: people close to the founders who believe in their vision and want to support them – like a rich uncle or aunt 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

3️⃣ Seed funds: specialized VC funds that focus on early-stage startups.

Some seed funds have been incredibly successful and made billions of dollars, like Y Combinator and SV Angel 💪

Because startups will often raise seed capital from multiple different people and funds, this conglomeration of capital that goes to the company is called a seed round 🌱

Seed rounds are usually relatively small in size – ranging from a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars 💸

Investors at this stage are typically betting on the potential of the idea and the team, rather than a proven track record or business model 🤞

However, investing in seed-stage startups is incredibly risky, as many companies at this stage don’t even have a product or team and most startups fail before they even get off the ground 😰