[News] As YC launches new batch, here’s how the early-stage venture market is faring today

[Douma]

 

Today, Y Combinator’s latest startup cohort will kick off a two-day presentation cycle. The Exchange loves a demo day, so we keep an eye on accelerators as best we can. We recently covered the latest concerning YC’s rival group Techstars’ geographic footprint as well.

As we wait for the first presentations to begin, this is a good time to take a quick look at the early-stage venture market that companies from accelerators of all stripes will operate in this year. Thanks to some early data from Carta, which many startups use to manage their cap tables, we can sketch a pretty clear picture of the state of venture for young tech upstarts. 

We recently learned that the earliest-stage rounds aligned the quickest to new market norms, while Series A and later ‘middle-stage’ rounds are still adapting to the changed venture market. We are not looking at Series D and later rounds today, saving our fire there for when we have more data and time.

 

Let’s talk median round sizes and deal values for seed through Series C in the first quarter of this year. How rough has 2023 been so far compared to a year ago? Have we seen any signs of recovery from Q4 2022? Is it getting easier for founders to raise money? The answers to those questions are not incredibly encouraging, except, it turns out, for the very smallest companies like those we’ll see later today.

State of the early stage
Before we dive head-first into the numbers, here are some caveats:

First, we’re looking at data pulled from Carta’s users. That comes with considerations around the geography covered and the completeness of the data. Still, as Carta is a popular tool, its data is a strong place to start even if it is, as all data sets are, imperfect.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/05/early-stage-venture-market/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAAbGhVeSuMfLEMljlfV7ts02vjjcSWnO7bM4zqzP0Ez6Y6LEmkGYsTGLv9Hs3BJGlwByxSg5sPIfdhd5Npbbwv-KVpUjn3N0mymAdsj3hr8PvTp61yVNivhEal_cLnMHZNcnNPGxBe7lNv7Qp3mnVVg09ha46zrxptDueBM4WRcZ