Carta

“The top five percent of seed rounds hit two hundred million dollar valuation.”

“Ordinary pricing has gone up 10, 20%, but top decile pricing has gone up six X or something like that, and that's really just a function of there are a class of bet that, frankly, didn't exist five years ago.”

“The only fact-based comment I'll make is, you know, the data from Carter, which is always excellent, says that dilution per round is going down.”

“When I look at the data coming out of Carta I want to say, you know, the San Francisco Bay Area is generally two standard deviations greater than in valuations than number two, New York.”

“There's always this cohort of mostly candidly AI infrastructure companies that are building foundational models or building like the tech around foundational models, and they are getting valued at Just astronomical numbers. You know, I call it a 160, 170, 182 …”

“The debate about margins in this AI world, I think is candidly a little overdone, like pretty early. There's every indication that the economics might continue to change.”

“If you're talking a seed round, you're raising between four and five million bucks. You're probably valuing the company at 20 to 22 post.”

“Like, you're talking 14, fifteen million dollars raised. You're talking seventy-five million or so post-money valuations on that.”

“The amount raised, you know, it used to be that the amount raised was maybe more like eight to ten million dollars in a series A and now it's much more call it 13 to 15. So that's a 50% increase in the capital”

“You've got the companies that raised about a year ago. So Q one of 20, 25 or so, how many of them have gotten to series A so far? It's something like 10 to 11%, which in a year is actually pretty good. It's much better than it was in 20, 22 or 23, where it was…”

“We're seeing like the median seed stage company on Carta has four employees, not counting the founders.”

“36 or 37% of the companies on Carta that joined us this year are solo founded. A lot of those companies will end up not being venture backed. So the venture backed percentage, it's probably more like a quarter maybe.”

“What I hope is that these companies, what I haven't seen so far, and what I hope happens, is that these companies that are being built by a solo founder grant equity to their early team in a different way. Like there are just higher levels of equity granted to…”

“And I think it's, there's a lot of acquisitions happening right now, mostly for AI talent. So I think there's, candidly, I think there's a lot of companies quietly, not saying it, that are quietly being built to get acquired earlier.”

“Now the top five percent of seed rounds are topping a hundred and seventy five million dollar valuations.”

“And even the 75th percentile or 50th percentile, we're talking about like forty-five million dollar seed rounds, which is insane.”

“The top 10% of startup valuations for Series D, C, B, et cetera, are now like 200 to 300% higher than 20 21.”

“Carta keeps track of cap tables for a lot of companies. How often do you access your cap table? Not very often, but it's super valuable. You can't F that up. Right? Like, it's, I'd probably rather use Carta for that than like, and they only, they don't charge …”

“You're seeing a lot more PhDs. You're seeing a lot more older founders. Yeah. You know, at least this is what's coming out of Carta in terms of where they're seeing investment dollars flow.”

“I actually met Peter in person recently and he told me he literally just took the job at Carta because of the data access that he would get.”

“Carta put out a recent report that Series A's that are AI enabled, or AI in their name, are getting a 30% premium.”

“Investment in U.S. Energy startups, which, this is Carta data, went just over eight billion dollars in twenty-twenty-two, and barely tipped past two billion in twenty-twenty-five, last year.”

“Carta sits on top of the cap table of 60,000 startups these days, as well as fund admin for two and a half to 3000 US venture funds.”

“You know, it candidly, if you put a tagline on that, it used to be really cool to say how many people worked for you. The higher the number, the better. And now the exact opposite is true. You want to have as lean a team as possible. You know, the idea of havi…”

“Insofar as we can tell, if you take that core B to B software company, you know, used to be, you have a million bucks in ARR. You can start talking about a series A. Now it's three on median and the top end is more like seven or eight.”

“At Seed, for instance, they're higher than they were in twenty-twenty-one, which was our most recent peak bubble era. And they're higher by a considerable amount. You know, the median seed valuation on Carta these days is probably something like 16 or seventee…”

“In the peak of that, in 20, 22, 22% were down rounds.”

“Right now we're hovering at about 15%, so on the downslope, things are getting more healthy, but we're not back to where we were before.”

“You know, the median, so if you look at Series A companies on Carta, the ones that raised Series A in twenty-twenty-one, they had 25 people working for them. The ones that, that raised Series A in twenty-twenty-five had 16, and by the end of this year we think…”

“Carta just put out recent data in their fund performance report, and series A's are getting a 30% premium. What do they attribute that to? AI. So, AI companies get a 30% premium versus non-AI companies.”

“There's also data in Carta that 30, that series A companies get a 30% premium on them compared to if they're AI versus non AI.”

“When you look at the data quarter over quarter in terms of venture capital rounds and whatever, you know, there's been like a steady increase the last, call it, year or so. Rounds are going up, although capital is moving much faster than that.”

“When you look at the data, yes, there's more capital being invested, but the number of rounds at seed stage for us this year is actually going to go down.”

“What it showed is that on a percentage of graduation basis, yes, the highest valued companies graduate to Series A little bit more often than the other companies. But it's not a massive difference. It's within a couple percentage points.”

“The companies that didn't had a big, big change were the lowest valued companies. So the lowest quartile, if you were raising a seed round and it's in the zero to call it 25th percentile of valuation, so on the very low end, those companies made it to series A…”

“Like safes are the dominant way to get money into a business. Now, anything under four million dollars is dominated by safes. Where it used to be, you'd start on safes and then you'd raise a seed, but if you're raising two and a half, three, four million dolla…”

“Like, the equity grants have not gone up for early employees. If anything, they've, like, Gone down just a smidge. There's a little bit of AI ML engineers who are, that's not true for, and those equity events have gone up.”

“Series A, 20, 21, you had 25 people working for the company, full-time equity holding employees working for the company. Now you probably have 17. 16.”

“Now, it's down to 17, and I think by the end of the year, that'll be more like 15. And that's at, you know, on the day of the Series A fundraise.”

“I think that stuff is going to get thrown out the window over the next two years. It's just going to be like, do we need this person?”

“If you looked at versus 20, 22, the salaries are up, but like not keeping pace with inflation. Everywhere except the obvious exception to that rule is AI ML engineering, which is flying.”

“Actually, AI ML engineers over the last 18 months on Carta, their pay packages have risen between 25 and 40%.”

“There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of founders on Carta who We'll never raise another venture round, but they are still three or four or even five years away from shutting the company down.”

“One of the very consistent patterns that we're seeing right now is every quarter, like clockwork, the time between these early stage rounds is getting longer.”

“Right now on Carta, the median time between A and B is close to a thousand days. It's a long time. 2.7 years or so.”

“I'll say upfront, the number of founders taking secondary after their seed round is twice as high this year as it was in 2021, which was the highest we'd ever seen.”

“While we're seeing, call it close to double the amount of founders taking something out at seed, like almost none of them have employee participation.”

“If you look on a median basis, if you're raising a million dollars today in the US, the median valuation cap is still about ten million.”

“Right now, what we're seeing is that seed stage is about sixteen million pre-money and three and a half or so million raised in the round. So you add that up and you're talking about a twenty million dollar post-money valuation for seed stage for companies on …”

“Series A, the median is fifty million pre-money, and raising about 10 to 11. So, sixty million post is a good benchmark for Series A.”

“In twenty-twenty-one, the peak was like a hundred and sixty million. Series B, that's pre-money, that, that was very expensive. Now it's about a 120, but it's been going up pretty consistently quarter over quarter.”

“The latest data has it at 20% of companies got from seed to A in two years or less.”

“Weirdly, in the last year, there's been a couple quarters where the companies that took a bridge More of them have made it to the next stage and the companies who haven't taken a bridge yet.”

“Turns out highly concentrated funds, typically like 20 companies per portfolio. Outperforms spray and pray, but spray and pray looks pretty good.”

“Carta has some, like, incredible data on this that 41% of companies seen in Serie A, Series A are all AI, quote, unquote, AI companies.”

“What it told people for listeners is they looked at all 547, 2018 series B investments, and then they did a histogram of where they come out in less than a one X, you know, one to a two X. Oh, that was series B. So 547, and then, you know, 20, 18% of them grea…”

“There's some interesting Carta data around this cycle in AI, and there is a premium that AI native companies are getting, and it's more dramatic in the Series A and Series B.”

“Other platforms, including, you know, share works from Morgan Stanley. Global shares from JP Morgan. Carter's got theirs. Like they're all good. There's just not a great experience. And I think that great experience is what's resonated with our customers.”

“Did you know, by the way, on Carta, like, the median time to raise for a Series B to a Series C is 18 to 24 months?”

“I just saw there was a stat out about Carta where it says like, you know, basically on, on, and DPI is the term distributions to paid in. And basically says like, you know, over 12 years in only about half the funds have returned one X DPI.”