Time for a good news-bad news story.
The bad news…
Statistically there is a low chance of getting seed funding from an R&D team.
The good news…
Once you get seed funding your chances of getting a series A are pretty good
What’s driving the win rates…
The honest answer is I don’t know but from talking to people on the funding teams I’ve heard that 50% of the seed pitches they get are either non-compliant (don’t adhere to application instructions), are total non-sense, or are people just looking for money who aren’t really interested in developing a product.
I’ve also heard that if there are multiple credible pitches for a given topic an R&D team will happily fund 2-4 different solutions and then select the most promising in series A.
For a bit more detail here are the win rates by program…