Most startup investors in our database are not in Silicon Valley

• 18,397 of 28,944 US startup investor records with a known state (63.6%) are outside California.
• 10,508 records are outside California, New York and Massachusetts.
• Texas leads the rest with 1,654 records and 385 that list pre-seed.
• Colorado (191) and Utah (112) list more pre-seed records than Georgia or Ohio.
• Start with investors in your state who list your stage, then widen to your region and sector.

If you build outside the Bay Area, it is easy to believe the money lives somewhere else. Our own numbers say otherwise. Of the 28,944 US startup investor records in our database with a known state, 18,397 (63.6%) are based outside California. And 10,508 (36.3%) sit outside all three of the usual hubs: California, New York and Massachusetts.

That is not the whole market. It is what we have cataloged: angels, angel groups, venture firms and their partners, micro-VCs, family offices, corporate VCs and accelerators, each record tied to the public source it came from. But it is a big enough sample to answer the question founders in Columbus, Nashville and Salt Lake City keep asking: is there anyone near me who writes checks? Yes. Thousands of them. (Zalarma investor database, as of 2026-11-01.)

The numbers, plainly

Zalarma holds 33,282 US records tagged as startup investors. Of those, 28,944 have a known state. Here is how they split:

• California: 10,547 records (36.4% of those with a state). The San Francisco Bay Area metro alone accounts for 8,041.
• New York: 5,971 records.
• Massachusetts: 1,918 records.
• Everywhere else: 10,508 records, across the other states, Washington, DC and US territories.

So the Bay Area really is the biggest single cluster. Nobody disputes that. But a cluster is not a monopoly. Most of the investor records we track are somewhere else.

The 15 biggest states outside the hubs

Texas leads by a wide margin, with Florida and Illinois both above 1,000 records. Below them, the list mixes classic tech states (Washington, Colorado) with places founders rarely hear about in startup media (Connecticut, Maryland, Tennessee).

A few things stand out:

• Texas nearly matches Massachusetts. Texas has 1,654 records to Massachusetts's 1,918, and at pre-seed the two are almost level: 385 records in Texas list pre-seed, against 408 in Massachusetts.
• Colorado and Utah punch above their size. Colorado lists 191 pre-seed records and Utah 112, more than Georgia (109) or Ohio (67).
• Connecticut is a different animal. Of its 368 records, only 59 list pre-seed. Nearly half of its records (173) are family offices, many around Greenwich and Stamford.

What this means at pre-seed

The earliest checks are the ones founders outside the hubs struggle with most, so we looked at pre-seed separately. Across the US, 8,652 startup investor records list pre-seed as a stage they invest in. That is 39.6% of the 21,863 records where we know the stage. Outside the hubs, the share holds up: in Texas, 385 of the 890 records with a known stage list pre-seed (43.3%). In Illinois, it is 280 of 647 (43.3%).

In other words, local investors are not only later-stage money waiting for you to move to San Francisco. Plenty of them say, in public, that they write the very first check. Our pre-seed investors by state report has the full list.

Why founders miss these investors

If the investors are there, why does it feel like they are not? Three reasons come up again and again.

1. Media follows the famous 50. Startup news covers a small set of big-name firms. A family office in Dallas or an angel group in Philadelphia rarely makes headlines, even when it writes dozens of checks.
2. Local investors are harder to search. Many do not have a polished website. Some invest through an LLC or a syndicate. You only find them if you know which public sources to read.
3. Founders filter by brand, not fit. A founder in Ohio spends weeks pitching coastal funds that rarely invest in Ohio, and never meets the regional fund down the road that backs a company like theirs every quarter.

How to use this if you raise outside the hubs

Start local and widen in rings. Here is the sequence we suggest:

1. Ring one: your state. Pull every investor in your state who lists your stage. Look at state pages like Texas, Ohio or Colorado for the shape of your local market.
2. Ring two: your region and your sector. Investors in neighboring states who back your sector are often more open than coastal funds. A healthcare founder in Tennessee should be looking at healthcare investors across the South, not only in Nashville.
3. Ring three: national investors with a record outside the hubs. Some national funds and syndicates make a point of investing outside the coasts. Their portfolios show it.

Then earn the warm path in. Local investors often know each other, and a single introduction from a founder they backed can open three more doors. Our warm intro playbook walks through how to get one when you know nobody, and the guide to raising pre-seed without a network covers the full timeline.

How we counted

Counts are records in the Zalarma investor database tagged as startup investors with a US location, as of 2026-11-01. A record is a person or a firm; a firm and several of its partners can each appear. A state is assigned from the location in the public source behind each record. Stage counts include only records where a stage is listed, and one record can list several stages. We do not publish any figure under 10. This is a view of our database, not a census of every investor in America.