A company that files a Form D gets a permanent identifier at the SEC, so its raises can be lined up in order.1 We took every US operating company that started two or more offerings of $1m or more since 2014 and measured the time between the start of one and the start of the next. That gives 40,147 gaps.
The median is 15.2 months. A quarter of companies come back within 9.2 months, and three quarters within 25.1 months. We left out gaps of under two months, which are mostly the same raise filed twice.
The clock is surprisingly steady across industries. Manufacturers and smaller financial companies come back fastest, at around 13 to 14 months. Biotechnology and health care companies are slowest, at about 16 months. Technology sits in the middle at 15.6.
Two things follow. The first is that most companies are never far from their next raise. If the median gap is 15 months and a raise takes six to nine months to fill, the work on the next one starts within months of the last one closing. The founders who treat a raise as an event, rather than a process that never quite stops, are the ones who find themselves raising in a hurry.
The next raise starts the day the last one closes.
The second is that the timing is readable from outside. A company that raised 14 months ago, has hired since and has not filed again is, more often than not, about to. Investors who keep a calendar of this have their conversations before the company has a deck. That is also when the terms are most open.
Method. US operating companies' Form D offerings (funds excluded) of $1m or more, begun from 2014 to October 2026. For each company, offerings are ordered by date of first sale and the gap is the number of days from one to the next, divided by 30.44. Gaps of 60 days or less are excluded. Amendments are part of the offering they amend, not new offerings. Industry figures are medians for the SEC's industry groups with the most gaps.
“The next raise starts the day the last one closes.”
Sources
- Form D data sets, US Securities and Exchange Commission, 2014 to 2026
Cite as: “Fifteen months between raises”, Norvian Review, 20 October 2026.