Bridge Round

Round names are taught as a clean sequence: seed, Series A, Series B. In practice the gaps between them open up. Seed money typically lasts around eighteen months, while opening a Series A requires the revenue level an investor wants to see, and plenty of companies reach month eighteen only halfway to that line.

For years a company in that position had no name for where it was standing. Board meetings kept circling the same exchange: can you open the A now, not for another six months, and what exactly pays for those six months. Because it wasn't a regular round, there was nowhere to file it, and the money usually showed up as a quiet top-up from existing shareholders.

Without a name there were also no standard terms. One company would price it like a regular round and issue shares, another would book it as a loan, and nobody had a basis for comparing the two. The phrase bridge round arrived with the recognition that this gap is a real place a company stands in, and that it deserves terms shaped for it rather than borrowed from somewhere else.

A company in this stage is short of the evidence needed to open the next round and its runway — the number of months the cash will last at the current spend — has dropped under six. Everything else about the stage follows from those two facts.

1. The name carries no number. People sometimes call it a Series A.5 because it sits between A and B, but that isn't an official label. The scale that counts a company's stages skips this one.
2. The amount is small. Twenty to thirty percent of the previous regular round is typical. A company that raised a $4 million Series A bridges with something like $800,000 to $1.2 million, because what it's buying is months rather than growth.
3. The participant list is narrow. Usually the existing shareholders put in money in proportion to what they already own. A new investor has little reason to study this company now, since a few months from now the same company appears in a regular round with more information attached.
4. The process is short. Where a regular round takes three to four months from first meeting to wire, a bridge closes in three to six weeks. The people participating already know the company, so most of the verification work drops away.
5. The paperwork is thin. Because the instruments used usually avoid setting a valuation, there's no term sheet style negotiation over share classes and rights — mostly just a discount and a cap.
6. The time it buys runs six to twelve months. Less than that isn't enough to move a number; more than that and opening a regular round would have produced better terms anyway.

Getting from a bridge to a regular round means the number that was missing when the bridge was raised is now there. Four conditions.

1. The one blocked metric crosses its line. If the Series A bar is $1.5 million in annual revenue and the company was at $900,000 when it bridged, $1.5 million needs to be on the board six months later. Improving several other metrics instead rarely substitutes. What the investor remembers is the number that fell short last time.
2. The improvement has lasted long enough to look deliberate. One good month proves nothing. Three consecutive months in the same direction give someone a basis for projecting the next quarter.
3. Spending has changed shape. If monthly outflow is identical after the bridge, the company arrives at the same question six months later. The next investor checks whether the money bought movement in the blocked metric or just more time.
4. The existing shareholders come back in. If an investor who joined the bridge sits out the regular round, that is the first thing a new investor asks about — the people closest to the company stepped back.

When the period ends without those four, two paths remain: a second bridge, or a down round at a reduced valuation. The first costs more ownership; the second cuts deeply into what existing shareholders hold.

"We're in a bridge right now, so we're opening two roles and holding the rest until the regular round."

The runway is a fixed length, so spending that won't pay back inside it stays frozen.

"One bridge is fine. A second one reads differently in the market."

Once looks like a timing problem; twice looks like a problem with the business.

"Every existing shareholder participated, pro rata."

The fact that nobody sat out is itself a signal to show the next investor.

Pagedeck entered this stage twenty-two months after its Series A. Paid teams were still growing, but the company sat about two quarters below the bar for a Series B, with four months of cash left. Grace opened a bridge targeting nine months, and all four existing investors came in.

What changed was the conversation inside the company. With nine months on the clock, Mia stripped the product roadmap of anything that wouldn't reach revenue in that window, and Ravi cut ad spend back to the paths where conversion was already proven. That's the usual shape of work in a bridge stage — more removing than starting.

The most common misreading is that a bridge round signals failure. It is money that wouldn't have been needed if the plan had held, so the inference is easy to make. But companies land here for two different reasons: the business isn't working, or the business is a quarter or two behind plan. The second is far more common, and waiting until three months of cash remain and then opening a down round leaves a much deeper mark. Read it as failure and you miss the window where opening it is still cheap.

The second mistake is assuming the ownership math can wait because this isn't a regular round. The instruments avoid setting a valuation, so there appears to be nothing to calculate yet. In reality, the moment the next round prices, every discount and cap attached to the bridge converts at once, and founders and early employees often find their stakes smaller than they pictured. Modeling the cap table against two or three possible next-round valuations before opening the bridge is the cheaper way to find that out.