As someone who knows admittedly knows nothing about startup funding rounds, how many more rounds of funding can they do before an IPO? Is it effectively infinite?
Going off the other reply, I wonder if a highly-active secondary market means that companies can raise series [A-Z]+ rounds effectively forever, where each "round" just refers to a giant purchase of shares under strict company supervision. Is this the new game for startups?
I can't speak for the specific case of Stripe, but it's fairly common for private companies to have a "tender offer" in which employees have the opportunity to sell some portion of their equity. This is often done in conjunction with a new investment round.
There's a newish term for this: RLO, Recurring Liquidity Opportunity. These are tender offers at some recurring interval. Even some companies that have a shorter lifespan (say 7 years) offer this.
I believe Databricks series L round raised $4B in late 2025, but earlier this year they raised another $5B so technically they've maybe completed series M round and are "on" series N round now? The press releases are a bit confusing to me.
It's semantics, but the latest raise might have been a follow-on to Series M, not a new round (to be clear, I know nothing about their finances, just speaking from experience at another company).
I imagine there are ways for existing investors to achieve liquidity while still raising venture funding. But an IPO is "the" liquidity event and I imagine there will be pressure from investors for that.
I also imagine that venture funding rounds have a lower ceiling than the public markets - but at these rounds I'm not so sure!
usually you would go through seed funding, the series a,b, and possibly a1 and b1. If you entered c or d territory it meant that you still had a chance but vc would be following you very closely. After d, you could raise money, but it would be under very unfavorable conditions
The number of rounds is irrelevant. Having crunched the data, what is relevant to terms is simply as you'd expect the rate of growth. The only reason it rarely happens with fast growing companies is that the liquidity of an IPO is attractive. As a result, companies doing many rounds are disproportionately companies that are performing too poorly to try and IPO.
they can do as many as they want. but at some point investors need/want to exit their positions and push for an IPO. That point is different for every company.
Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.