Series A Funding is the fourth of GTA Online’s original apartment heists: Trevor Philips bankrolls his drug empire by having your four-player crew rob every supplier in Blaine County, then defend the stash when all of them come looking for it. It has the most setups of any original heist relative to its $707,000 pot, which is why it usually props up the bottom of our heists ranked list — but you still have to clear it to unlock Pacific Standard and to stay eligible for the completion challenges. Model your cut before you start with the heist payout planner.
What you need
Like every original heist, Series A is planned from a high-end apartment’s heist room. The leader fronts no setup cash for the originals — the cost is your crew’s time across five setups.
The armored Kuruma remains the original-heist workhorse. Its bulletproof glass trivializes the drive-and-shoot setups (Trash Truck escorts, the Bikers approach) and keeps a Criminal Mastermind run alive.
You’ll also want a full team of four on voice chat — Series A cannot be started with fewer players, and the finale punishes crews that can’t coordinate.
The five setups
Each setup steals product from a different supplier, and every one of them remembers it in the finale:
- Coke — Hit a dealer party on a yacht off the Del Perro coast from sea and air, then run the cocaine back to Ron. Splitting into a boat team and a helicopter team is the intended (and fastest) plan.
- Trash Truck — Drive a Trashmaster around south Los Santos collecting product stashed in pickup points while gang attackers close in. The truck soaks bullets; the escort car does the killing.
- Bikers — Raid The Lost MC’s camp at Stab City at night and drive their two product vans home. Quiet early takedowns keep the exit manageable.
- Weed — Assault the sawmill grow operation in Paleto Forest and steal the product trucks — plus a Technical, the gun truck this heist made famous.
- Steal Meth — Storm the O’Neil brothers’ ranch and haul a tanker of meth-cooking chemicals to Chef. One player tows the tanker; everyone else keeps the pursuers off it.
None of the setups are hard individually — the drag is that there are five of them for a pot the four-setup Prison Break nearly matches.
The finale: defend, then deliver
The finale has two phases. First, the crew joins Trevor at a warehouse under the freeway on the east side of Los Santos and defends the combined stash against waves of everyone you robbed — bikers, gangbangers and the O’Neils, arriving by road and air. Trevor assigns two players to the north end and two to the south; hold your positions, stay in cover, and let the waves come to you rather than pushing out.
Once the assault breaks, the product is loaded into two trucks and the crew convoys them to the buyer at a house by the El Gordo Lighthouse, north of Grapeseed — with attackers harassing the whole route and a buyer who walks if you dawdle. Two players drive, two escort:
A Technical is on hand for the escort team in the delivery phase — its mounted machine gun makes short work of the chase vehicles that swarm the trucks on the run north.
Keep the trucks moving no matter what. Escorts should drive ahead of the convoy and clear pursuers before they reach the drivers.
Why the payout is the weakest
The $707,000 pot is barely more than Prison Break’s $700,000, yet Series A demands one more setup, and it’s less than half of Pacific Standard’s $1,500,000 for the same crew size. Split four ways after the leader’s cut, most members walk away with well under $200,000 for six missions of work. Run it once for progression and the challenges, then move on — or skip crew logistics entirely with the solo Cayo Perico route.
Elite challenge and completion bonuses
The elite challenge asks for a finale finish in under 6:30, 75 kills, and nobody getting wasted — worth an extra $100,000. The kill quota comes naturally if you fight the warehouse waves aggressively; the clock is the real enemy, so break for the trucks the moment the last wave drops and take the fastest highway route north.
Series A also counts toward the original-heist completion awards: All in Order and Loyalty (about $1,000,000 each) and the $10,000,000 Criminal Mastermind for clearing every heist in order, on hard, with the same four players and zero deaths. Series A’s defense phase is a notorious Mastermind run-killer — on a Mastermind attempt, forget the elite timer, stay in cover, and treat survival as the only objective. Hard difficulty raises the pot by 25%, so Mastermind crews lose nothing by playing it safe.
Done with the originals? See how the rest of the money-makers compare.