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Welcome to the new week.
While Equity recording this morningI noted with surprise an interesting piece of data that got me wondering about the current premium that venture capitalists are paying for seed stocks, and if we can see anything new from the data from 2022, especially since complaints about YC’s starter prices are in the news again.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
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The following is a somewhat digital consolidation of Several pieces This The Exchange published last week. Read on if you have a minute and a fresh coffee, and thanks as always for your patience:
Today’s Starter Prices
One way to think about startup valuations is to categorize them by company stage, using median results to create a mind map of the market. Map recently bucketed the median pre-money valuations of Series A, B, and C startups in $40 million, $90 million, and $173 million increments, respectively, to take a recent example.
Each number is down from recent highs: $49.4 million for Series A in Q1 2022; $161 million for Series B in Q1 2022; and a staggering $416 million for Series C towers in Q2 2021.
However, these assessments are imperfect. First of all, Carta doesn’t have an overview of all transactions, because it can only see those that its startup clients are raising, so there are very understandable data completeness issues in its very dataset. useful.
Second, it is not enough to look at the displayed price. We need more data than the median price range to really understand how startup valuations are obtained.
How prices become
Why do we need all this data? We also want to know what the startups in these series buckets have under the hood: the Why behind the What. That’s why Nine Point’s SaaS Towels, which provide time-limited input data that drives ratings, have become a staple for us data nerds who follow the startup fundraising game. And SaaS towel history—essentially any data regarding software startup fundraising that can fit on a small piece of paper—allows us to compare and contrast standards over time. It’s useful.