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Out of curiosity: on a $8m round, how much is expected for the lead to invest?

I would guess ~$2m, but you gave the impression that it would be more about $5m.

VCs are expected by their LPs to get 15-25% ownership. So there is no way for an investor to invest $2m on an $8m round and get to that level of ownership.

Leads will take as much of the round as they can. This is usually at least 51% but often much more.

Worth mentioning that given the current cheap money, a lot of the investment is leveraged, on credit or timed. So you don't have to have 2m sitting idle in a bank to lead a round.

As far as I understand VCs(General Partners) don't hold investment money. They just get paid fees and have a mandate from Limit Partners to invest, so when they want to invest, they just call on LPs to transfer the money.

I imagine each VC fund has a multitude of LPs and they each manage cash based on their own strategies. The key is that they have enough liquid assets to meet the obligations in a timely manner.

Obviously, each fund is set up separately and might have a different structure.

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