Bridges are taking a bigger share of the venture market

The record

Carta's Insights team reported on 1 July 2024 that 42% of all seed-stage financings on its platform in the first quarter of 2024 were bridge rounds, the highest share of any quarter that decade, with Series A close behind at 43%. A later post, published 19 September 2025, measured the trend a different way: in the second quarter of 2025, bridge rounds accounted for 16.6% of all venture dollars raised on Carta, up from 11.8% in the same quarter a year earlier, and compared with less than 10% of dollars in a typical quarter of the 2021 bull market.

What the sources establish

Carta defines a bridge round consistently across both posts: an interim financing, usually structured as an extension of or follow-on to a company's existing primary round, often bringing back the same investors, that typically does not set a new valuation. The two figures measure different things: the 2024 post counts the share of deals at seed and Series A that were bridges, while the 2025 post counts the share of total dollars raised across all stages that came through a bridge, so a reader should not average them into one number. Both agree on direction: bridges became a larger part of the financing landscape after the 2022 reset than during the prior boom.

Scope and revision

Neither figure describes the venture market outside Carta's own platform, and neither treats a bridge as a failure signal by itself; the 2025 post notes that most startup fundraising still happens through newly priced primary rounds. The rise in bridge share is consistent with a market where new primary rounds became harder to close at an acceptable valuation, making an extension from existing investors a faster and less public alternative. Carta's data cannot distinguish a bridge raised from a position of strength, extending runway to hit a bigger milestone, from one raised because a primary round could not be closed at all.

The decision in front of you

Editorially: a founder evaluating whether to raise a bridge rather than push for a priced round can use these figures as a base rate, not a verdict. Bridges were common enough by 2024 and 2025 that taking one carries little of the stigma it might have a decade earlier, but the reason for the bridge still matters more than the fact of it.

• Does the cited bridge-round statistic measure deal count or dollar volume?
• Did the round set a new valuation, or is it structured explicitly as an extension?
• Are the participating investors existing holders, new investors, or both?

A bridge round is a defined financing structure, not a euphemism, and Carta's data shows it becoming a larger share of the market by two different measures. Reading which measure a given statistic uses, deals or dollars, is the difference between describing a stage's financing pattern and describing the whole market's.