How to Understand Early Stage Startups in One Chart

How to Understand Early Stage Startups in One Chart

Author

Peter Walker

|

Read time: 

1 minute

Published date: 

July 12, 2023

Valuations at seed and Series A hold up well, but volume of rounds is the real indicator of ecosystem health—and the dotted line showing deal count tells a...

LinkedIn: How to Understand Early Stage Startups in One Chart

How to understand early-stage startups in one chart.

Valuations (single line in the chart) are pretty solid these days! So why does it feel so...dour?

Mostly due to the dotted line, which shows volume (number of rounds).

Caveat here - I do think the volume lines will move up for Q2 once our final numbers are in. Volume data on the platform lags a bit.

But still - the level of activity probably dictates the general "vibe" of early-stage startups more than the exact valuation does.

Does this mean that only the "best" Seed and Series A companies are raising? Well, certainly fewer are. VCs are likely raising the bar in terms of metrics they want in order to invest.

But the companies that are raising are doing so at pretty robust valuations.

More data every week in our Data Minute newsletter - URL in the chart :)

#cartadata #valuations #seed #SeriesA #startups #fundraising

Peter Walker
Author: Peter Walker
Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project.

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