Where Startups Actually Raise: California's Share Is Down a Quarter Since 2018

Every year someone declares the death of Silicon Valley, and every year someone else posts the same rebuttal thread. Both sides argue from anecdotes. The filings hold the actual answer, because nearly every US private raise generates a Form D with the issuer’s address on it.

We mapped all of ours: 35,483 funded US operating companies — every company in our tape that raised at least $1M, with the funds and investment vehicles stripped out.

The standings: California’s lead is real

California has 8,343 funded companies — more than New York and Massachusetts combined. Anyone claiming the Valley is finished is arguing with a mountain.

But absolute leadership and momentum are different questions, and the second one is where the map is genuinely moving.

The shift: who’s raising now

Compare companies by the era of their latest raise — those whose most recent filing was 2016–18 against those whose most recent filing is 2024–26:

Three things in that chart are worth more than the whole discourse:

California lost a quarter of its share. From 26.8% of active raisers to 19.4% — not an exodus of existing companies, but a meaningful redistribution of new activity. The Valley’s gravity is intact; its monopoly is not.

Florida nearly doubled. From 2.8% to 4.9% of active raisers — the largest relative gain of any major state. Miami’s boom was easy to dismiss as a 2021 Twitter phenomenon; the filings say it kept compounding after the tweets stopped.

The middle held. Massachusetts (6.9% → 6.8%), Texas (6.4% → 6.5%), Colorado (3.3% → 3.5%), New York down about a point. The story isn’t “everyone moved to one place” — it’s California’s surplus redistributing across several.

The most recent tape sharpens it further: in the last six months of filings, California leads with 253, but New York (159) and Texas (157) are statistically tied for second, with Florida (117) close behind. The two-coast picture of American startup funding is now a four-region picture.

What this means if you’re operating — or selling

Benchmarks are regional now. The advice ecosystem still prices everything in Bay Area terms — salaries, dilution norms, round sizes. But the median US raise is $1.75M, and the share of it happening outside California grows every year. If you’re a Texas or Florida company measuring yourself against Valley round sizes, you’re benchmarking against a market you’re not in.

For sellers, geography stopped being a discount — mostly. A decade ago, a software company in Tampa or Columbus started M&A conversations with an implicit haircut. With a fifth of active raisers in California and buyers running fully remote diligence, what matters is the metrics, not the zip code. Where geography still bites is buyer awareness: coastal strategics genuinely don’t know the non-coastal landscape, which means companies outside the clusters are systematically under-approached — worse for inbound, better for a run process that brings the buyers to you.

For reading your own market: if your competitors cluster in a rising state, expect their next rounds to come easier than the era you remember; if they cluster in the Valley, the funnel above them is a quarter tighter than it was in 2018.

The honest caveats

Counts, not dollars, on purpose: state dollar totals are dominated by a handful of mega-filers and mislead (Texas’s raw dollar total rivals California’s on less than a third of the companies — that’s a few enormous filings, not a typical Texas raise). And the issuer address is where the company files from, which for distributed teams is a choice as much as a location. Neither caveat changes the share trend; both change how precisely you should quote any single state’s number.

Every figure is computed from SEC Form D filings in our own tape — primary source, pooled vehicles excluded, nothing estimated. The monthly cut, including state mix, is free at the Deal Intel monitor.