Every year around this time, founders start asking me the same question, and it's usually some version of "Should I raise now, or just wait until January?"

It's a fair question. We're heading into the holidays, partners are traveling, and there's a lot of folklore floating around about this being a bad time to raise.

Unfortunately, like most answers in this business, it depends. BUT it depends mostly on your own circumstances, and those usually point to a pretty simple answer. The biggest one is runway, so ask yourself whether you CAN comfortably wait until after the new year to raise, because that answer decides which half of this post is for you.

And let me be clear, VC is NOT closed for the holidays. Most funds, including ours, stay open straight through the end of the year, and we read pitch decks right up until midnight on December 31st. What DOES slow things down is people, since partners are traveling or playing catch-up, and that makes it harder to get everyone on the same page to make funding decisions.

So let's look at the data and then do the math, with a big shout out to Carta, Peter Walker, SaaStr and DocSend for a lot of the research and numbers behind this.

Is there still time in November?

Yes. Well, maybe. The good news is that the weeks before Thanksgiving are when investors are most engaged, and DocSend's data shows investor deck views hit their annual peak around this time of year. That makes it the best month of the year to get in front of people, but getting in front of people is a lot different than getting to a close.

Which camp you fall into really depends on where you already are in your process.

• You already have momentum. If you've got warm conversations going, partner meetings on the books, or maybe even a lead circling, push hard now. December is the biggest signing month of the year (more on this below), so ask your lead directly whether they can get to a term sheet before the holidays.
• You're starting from zero. A raise kicked off in mid-November is likely a February close (we'll do that math below), so use November to get meetings while investors are paying attention and plan your cash around that timeline.

Either way, I wouldn't sit November out.

December is for closing deals

December actually isn't as slow as people think. Carta sees actual cap tables rather than press releases, and its data shows December is usually one of the biggest months of the year for signed startup deals. When SaaStr dug into Carta's data on more than 42,000 primary rounds from US startups between 2018 and 2024, December averaged 10.8% of the year's deals, which is the highest of any month and roughly 30% above what an even split would give you.

The thing to remember is that those numbers show when deals were SIGNED, not when they started. Carta's Peter Walker describes Q4 as "furious negotiation in Q4 that culminates in digital pen on paper in December," and Carta has also pointed to year-end deadlines on term sheets that were signed earlier in the year. So most of that December spike comes from founders who started back in September, and that window has passed.

DocSend's data, shared in TechCrunch back in 2019, lines up with this. Founders send the most decks in October, and investor views peak in November before falling off sharply in December. Their advice was that if your round isn't closed by the end of November, you risk losing momentum and having to restart your process after the new year.

The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital says the Thanksgiving to New Year's stretch can "mess up your momentum with a firm." Investors don't stop working, but the steps between a great first meeting and a term sheet need a lot of calendars to line up, and in December those calendars get choppy. This lines up with what I hear from investors on the Fun Raising podcast, where so much of getting a deal done comes down to the schedules of the team making the decision, often even more than the founder or the company.

January is slower than you think

If you're planning on "picking up where you left off in January" and quickly closing your round, you could be making a mistake, because the idea that investors come back in January hungry to deploy doesn't really show up in the data. In the same Carta dataset, January and February were actually the SLOWEST months of the year at 6.8% and 6.9% of deals, which is about 18% below an average month, while December saw roughly 1.6 times as many signings as January.

Now, this doesn't mean that January is a bad time to start. It means January is when everyone starts, and the closings show up later. What it does mean is that if you decide to push your fundraise to the start of the year, you shouldn't expect things to close quickly, and it may not happen until March.

So if you're reading this and you don't have comfortable runway into March, I'd start picking up the pace right now instead of waiting for January.

Do the math

DocSend's latest reports found pre-seed raises took 12 weeks on average, and most successful seed companies closed in 12 weeks or less, so call it about three months. Here's what that looks like on the calendar.

• Want to sign in the December wave? Twelve weeks before December 18 is September 25, so that window has already closed.
• Starting cold in mid-November? Twelve weeks from November 11 lands on February 3, and that's before Thanksgiving week and the stretch between Christmas and New Year's take about three working weeks off the board, so realistically you're closing in late February.
• Starting the first Monday of January? Twelve weeks puts you at March 29, right on the edge of Q2, which Walker calls "the most reliable full quarter for deals."

If you look at those last two, starting cold today only buys you about five weeks, and it drops the two worst calendar breaks of the year right into the middle of your process, which can certainly slow down momentum (though not entirely).

If you have runway, prepare now

If you have the cash to get comfortably into spring, use November and December to get everything ready so the raise moves faster once you start.

Start by tightening your deck. Investors move fast on a first pass, so your opening slides need to say what you're building and why it matters right away. DocSend found VCs spent 40% more time on seed Team slides in 2024 than the year before, which lines up with one of our own Harpoon fundraising lessons that few investors read your TAM slide and most go straight to your team slide. Keep the deck to 10 to 12 slides, build a five-slide teaser for cold outreach, and then get feedback from founders who raised recently and from people who'll tell you the truth.

Next, build a real target list of investors who write checks at your stage, in your space, and are actively deploying. Pulling names from the cap tables of companies you admire is a great place to start, and a short list of the right firms is worth a lot more than a long list of big names.

Then start a few conversations, whether that's a coffee chat, a quick update to investors you already know, or an intro through a founder in their portfolio. You're not pitching yet, you're just building relationships so the people across the table already know your name before you kick off, and as Walker put it, even if the year-end window has passed, that "doesn't mean you shouldn't be trying to build those relationships now."

Start earlier than you think you need to. A first check typically takes 100+ investor conversations, while most first-time founders start with about 30, and November and December are a good time to start chipping away at that.

When you do kick off, compress your meetings into a tight window and run waves of eight to ten investors so momentum builds. That way you're walking into January with some warm relationships already in place.

If you don't have runway, start now

If your runway is short, don't wait around for a better month. Start now. Be upfront about timing and tell investors where you are, when you need to close, and what's already committed. Good investors appreciate clarity, and a real deadline keeps a process moving through the holidays. Just don't invent urgency, because VCs talk to each other and fake FOMO usually gets caught. Don't set a deadline you can't actually enforce.

December is still the biggest signing month of the year, and some firms want deals done before year-end, so a focused founder with a credible timeline can take advantage of that. Just don't expect a process that starts after Thanksgiving to move as fast as it would in the spring, and plan your cash as if it slips into February.

It's also worth looking hard at your burn today, since every month of runway you buy gives you more control over when you raise and on what terms. While you're at it, raise for a milestone, not a number. Work backward from the milestone your next round depends on, cost it out, and add a buffer for delays, and the holidays are a good reason to make that buffer a little bigger.

Please don't do the January cold email blast

The worst plan is going quiet until the first week of January and then emailing every investor on the same morning. Every founder who waited is doing the exact same thing, investors are still digging out of their inboxes, so your email gets buried with hundreds of others.

Waiting until January to raise doesn't mean you should do nothing until then. There are really two things to work on, and the first is sharpening your materials, including your deck, your data room, your target list, and the story you tell in the first five minutes of a meeting.

The second is something a lot of founders skip, which is getting in front of investors before everyone else does. Send a short update to the investors you already know, ask a few new ones for 20 minutes with no pitch attached, and get warm intros through founders in their portfolio. Something as simple as "We're planning to raise in Q1 and I'd love your take on what you'd need to see" works well here. Most investors will say yes to a low-pressure coffee in November, and that's a lot easier than trying to get noticed in an inbox that just got back from vacation.

Pay attention to who leans in, who asks for the deck, and who wants an update in a month. Score each firm's enthusiasm, and once that weighted interest adds up to roughly 3x your round (one of our own lessons), you're ready to kick off. If you do this well, your January outreach becomes a follow-up instead of a cold intro.

The founders who win in January are the ones who used December to get ready. They have a solid deck, a focused list, and a few investors who already know them, so their emails feel like a next step. And when you do send cold emails, write them yourself. Investors spot AI-written outreach fast, and your cold email gets 60 seconds at best, so all it really needs to do is get them to click through.

So, to raise or not to raise? Check your runway first. If you have time, use November and December to sharpen your materials and warm up investors, then launch in January. If you don't, start now and be honest about your timeline. Either way, don't let the calendar be the reason you stall out.

Sources

1. Harpoon Ventures, "Fundraising Lessons"
2. Carta, "Is venture capital a seasonal business?" by Peter Walker (Nov 2023)
3. SaaStr, "Every Month is a Good Month to Raise: What 42,000+ Funding Rounds Tell Us" (Carta data, US rounds 2018 to 2024)
4. Carta, "The state of private company financing in 2018"
5. TechCrunch, "Data says there are only two seasons for fundraising and one secret window" by Russ Heddleston of DocSend (2019)
6. Dropbox DocSend, 2024 Pre-Seed and Seed Fundraising Reports (Dec 2024 release)
7. Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital, "The Macro VC Calendar"