The first question investors asked me in my early months of pitching was, “Where are you from?”

The accent gave me away every time.

Following the failed 2020 revolution in Belarus, I moved my company, , to Estonia. I arrived in Estonia with no English, no network and no understanding of the Western startup world. I spent months studying the language, practicing daily to improve my pronunciation and confidence.

Even with my very basic English, I started pitching immediately. I met an angel who decided to invest after just one pitch. Only half a year after our relocation, we closed our first round of $250,000.

In today’s market, where early-stage capital is shrinking, your ability to communicate is as critical as your product. Forty-four percent of U.S. unicorn founders are immigrants, and many of them started as outsiders. You may not “look the part,” but that doesn’t have to stop you from raising money. It certainly didn’t stop me.

From that experience, here are three lessons that I believe are highly valuable for any founder aiming to stand out.

Position yourself as a problem solver, not a capital-raiser

Investors meet hundreds of founders each year. Most of them open with how much they’re raising, not why they exist. When I started framing myself as someone obsessed with solving a real communication problem, not someone asking for capital, everything changed.

People invest in clarity and conviction. Instead of limiting myself to talking about market size or monetization, I illustrated the problem: how speech anxiety, accents and vocal tension limit people’s confidence globally. When your story is rooted in a genuine mission, your accent, location or background stops being a liability and becomes part of the proof.

Use body language to communicate confidence

How you carry yourself speaks louder than your words. Investors read it instantly. For example, if you lean back when challenged, it looks defensive. That’s why when I answer questions, I lean slightly forward, smile and nod. It signals that I’m engaged and listening instead of trying to protect myself.

Confidence also shows up in stillness. When you know your material, you don’t need to over-gesture. Remember that the goal is not to perform, but to connect. Smile first, listen fully and never interrupt. These small actions create a sense of trust long before you start talking about numbers.

The studies we relied on in product development show that voices with a lower pitch are perceived as 40% more confident and authoritative. Founders don’t need to fake that, but they can train it, the same way they can train their pitch deck.

Use pitch competitions as leverage

As I worked on my communication skills, pitch competitions became my springboard. They didn’t guarantee investment, but they built momentum. And in three first years, we won six: , , StartupFair, AWS AI Challenge, the European AI Startup Program by , and . Those events brought us $700,000 and connections that led directly to our seed round.

Beyond the funding, there’s enormous value in visibility. By participating in these competitions, you get feedback, credibility and stage time. All of that accelerates learning and helps you make your story resonate across languages, markets and personalities.

When you don’t sound like an insider, raising capital is about clarity, control and presence. Investors may notice your accent in the first five seconds, but if you master those next five minutes, they’ll remember your idea, not where you came from.

Founders are obsessed with anxiously trying to get in front of investors, but anxiety kills a sale. You’ve already heard the advice from a startup mentor: practice your pitch, find your own mentors, and get feedback on your ideas.

In my experience, ideas and passion are key, but it’s your polished soft skills that actually let you show that passion to anybody.

is the co-founder and CEO of , a soft skills AI coaching startup. The company has more than 4 million downloads and 50,000 subscribers worldwide. His journey is deeply personal; he was bullied for unclear diction at school, which inspired his mission to help people communicate better. After being forced to flee his home country following the 2020 revolution, Lahoika arrived in Estonia with minimal command of English and used his own app to train his voice, securing his first round of funding within just six months. The winner of the AI Challenge and x European AI Startup Program, Vocal Image recently raised a $3.6 million seed round led by (France) and scaled to more than $14 million ARR.

Related reading:

• The Immigrant Edge: How Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs Drive America’s Unicorn Boom
• New To Silicon Valley? What I Wish I’d Known As An Immigrant Founder Back In 2017

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Although a lot of attention has been paid to huge funding rounds at the later stage – in particular, the recent spate of mega-rounds led by SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund – outsized rounds abound at all stages. Crunchbase News has also explored some of the smallest funding rounds startups raise. But up to this point, we haven’t taken a look at big rounds at early stages. And this is a somewhat glaring omission because seed and early-stage funding rounds make up the surpassing majority of deal volume around the world.

If you’ll forgive the pun, it’s kind of a big deal.

Today, we’re going to take a look at this growing phenomenon, what it means, and what might be happening “under the hood” in supergiant seed rounds.

The Rise And Rise Of Supergiant Rounds

In this section, we’re going to zip through a fairly large amount of funding data rather quickly. The exact numbers are less important than the overall trends they indicate. To wit, that both middle-of-the-road rounds and their supergiant counterparts alike have grown significantly in size over the past decade.

But before showing the charts and analyzing the data behind them, allow us a second to explain what, exactly, we’re talking about when we talk about supergiant rounds.

For our purposes here, we’ve borrowed the term “supergiant” from astronomy. , as the name may suggest, are some of the most massive and luminous celestial bodies in the universe. Similarly, the supergiant funding rounds we’re examining here are among the largest raised by startups, and they’re the rounds that grab the most headlines.

Hunting For Giants

We define the set of “supergiant” rounds as the top ten percent of deals struck for each round type, by year. So, for example, if there were 5,000 Seed rounds closed in a given year, the “supergiants” would be the top 500 seed rounds – ranked by the amount of money raised – for that year. Likewise, if there were 1,500 Series A rounds closed in that same year, we’d call the 150 largest Series A rounds supergiants as well.

The following analysis is based on a dataset of . We’ll compare the average size of supergiant rounds against a of round sizes, which doesn’t include the top or bottom ten percent of rounds.

Why go with a trimmed average? We want to exclude the supergiant rounds because they’d artificially skew the general average upward, but by the same token we want to filter out the smallest rounds (, for example) that would artificially skew figures lower. To reiterate, by comparing an average of the median eighty percent rounds to the average of the top ten percent of rounds, we’ll be able to see how supergiant round sizes related to those “in the middle of the road” over the past decade.

Our primary focus here will be deals from the earliest stages – Seed and Angel, Series A, and Series B – but we’ll get into some findings from later stages too. Let’s start with the earliest rounds and move later from there. And once we’ve shown the data, we’ll share some observations gleaned from it.

Seed And Angel Rounds

For , we found both that the size of both middle-of-the-road and supergiant rounds have grown significantly over the past decade, as the chart below shows.

The size of middle-of-the-road Seed and Angel rounds grew by roughly 145 percent over the course of the last ten years, and supergiant rounds are just under 63 percent larger than the supergiant average from a decade ago.

And – in what will become a common refrain – the companies that raised these large rounds are primarily located in just a few cities.

A majority of supergiant Seed and Angel rounds were raised by startups based in the SF Bay Area and New York City. Let’s see if the same pattern occurs at Series A.

Series A Rounds

Like with seed and angel rounds, the chart below aggregates data from and shows how much Series A rounds have grown over the past decade.

The size of supergiant Series A rounds grew by a similar amount to middle-of-the-road Seed and Angel deals, increasing by 140 percent over the course of the last ten years. More pedestrian Series A rounds are just under 130 percent larger, up from a trimmed average of $4.93 million in 2008 to $11.29 million in 2018, year to date.

The distribution of startups raising supergiant Series A rounds is similar to even earlier-stage counterparts.

Again, a majority of supergiant Series A rounds are raised by startups headquartered in just a few cities. In addition to San Francisco and New York City, life-sciences heavy Boston takes second place in the ranking of a decade’s worth of huge Series A rounds.

Last but not least, it’s on to Series B.

Series B Rounds

Our Series B dataset contained , but unlike earlier rounds the general “up and to the right” trendline isn’t so clear. As the chart below shows, it appears as though the size of Series B rounds has somewhat leveled off, at least on an annual timescale.

Supergiant Series B rounds have grown by 65 percent over the last decade. The more middle-of-the-road Series B round has also grown, but by a more significant 83 percent since 2008.

The geographic distribution of startups that raised the most supergiant Series B rounds is strikingly similar to the population of Series A fundraisers.

Again, San Francisco and the broader Bay Area ranks at the top of the charts, followed by Boston, NYC, Los Angeles, and San Diego – the same rank order as the prior round type.

And now that we’ve got the raw data out there, let’s see what we can take away from all of this.

The Pie Shrinks As The Middle Grows

Higher Growth Rates Amongst Middle-Of-The-Road Rounds

Although the growing size of supergiant rounds may be impressive due to sheer size alone, it’s actually middle-of-the-road rounds that have grown the most consistently over the past decade.

In two of the three round types we reviewed above, the compound annual growth rate (or CAGR, for those of you who like acronyms) of supergiants underperformed more quotidian rounds, as the table below shows.

This all suggests that despite supergiant rounds getting all the attention, performance in more middle-of-the-road rounds has been even better, at least from a dollars-raised standpoint.

Growing Geographic Concentration Of Supergiant Rounds

By definition, supergiant rounds suck up a lot of capital, and they seem to be primarily located in just a few deep pools. As the funding cycle progresses, it appears as though more of the supergiant rounds are raised in just a handful of cities.

As the funding cycle progresses, the percentage of rounds raised by startups located in the top three cities seems to increase after an initial drop following Seed. 55 percent of supergiant A rounds were raised by startups from the Bay Area, NYC, and Los Angeles. Although not pictured above, 67 percent of supergiant Series C deals were struck by companies from the Bay Area, Boston, and New York City.

But what’s even more striking is the declining percentage share of supergiant rounds raised by startups outside the top-five rankings for a particular stage.

The chart above shows that the ability to close very large rounds is generally concentrated in fewer and fewer places as the funding cycle progresses.

We stopped our analysis at Series D due to limited sample size.

The Growing Dominance Of Supergiant Rounds

Some have shown that it’s not just the average round size that’s growing across most stages over time, but the number of large outlier rounds as well. For example, , a venture investor at , that the proportion of Series A deals larger than $50 million grew by an astonishing 721 percent from 2008 to 2017. The share of Series B rounds in the $50 million-plus range grew three hundred percent over the same period. He concluded that “venture is being increasingly driven by large rounds.”

Inspired by Levine’s research, , an economist, and strategy advisor, that between 2007 and 2017, deal volume has declined while dollar volume rose across almost all stages of funding he analyzed. This is in line with analysis from Crunchbase News from late 2017. And in , he charted the growing number of large rounds over that time period.

Indeed, it was Levine and Hathaway’s analysis that prompted us to look at the numbers as well, albeit from a slightly different angle, one more focused on geography and population-scale shifts in round size at the highest end of the spectrum. Our findings confirm a piece of common sense: expensive cities (see: NYC and the Bay Area) or and those home to capital-intensive industries like biotechnology and advanced manufacturing (see: Boston and San Diego) are the primary drivers and beneficiaries of the trend toward supergiant rounds

A decade’s worth of history suggests that this is one status quo that won’t be disrupted soon, no matter how much “disruptive” startups may raise in the future.