Burn Rate Benchmarks by Stage

Burn rate has no universal good number, a Series B company burning $400,000 a month may be healthier than a seed startup burning $60,000, because the only meaningful question is what the burn buys relative to the stage. The bands below, from Revenue Map's benchmark tables, describe typical monthly net burn by funding stage and are the thresholds its models use when projecting cash and flagging the runway-out month.

Reading the ladder: pre-revenue startups look disciplined under $50,000 of monthly burn, seed-stage under $80,000, Series A under $200,000, and Series B and beyond under $500,000, with each stage's poor threshold roughly triple its good one. Crossing into the poor band is not automatically fatal, but it demands an unusually strong growth rate to justify, which is the intuition the Rule of 40 formalizes later in a company's life.

Definitions matter here more than anywhere. Net burn is cash out minus cash in each month, and it is the number runway is computed from; gross burn ignores revenue and describes your cost base. Track both: a company with high gross burn but strong revenue has options, while the same net burn built entirely of fixed costs does not. Revenue Map's models project both lines across 36 months so the difference is visible before it matters.