Over the past few quarters, we have been digesting commentary, or, in case of founders, dealing with the uphill task of fund-raising and wallowing in a ton of advice from various sources on how to deal with the situation.
I believe we are essentially at a place which is the old normal, hyphenated with an exuberant period between 2014 and the first half of 2015. Using Venture Intelligence data for the vintage years 2012 through 2015, I looked at the financing steps needed for a company to get to Series A.
For those of us in the market at the time, one may recall that 2012 was quite a tough year for venture financing. Then we had the “bull-run” of 2014 and part of 2015. So what was it like to raise Series A financing if you got seeded in 2012. On average, it took you two years and 1.4x rounds of seed funding to get to Ser A (defined as a round >$2M). In 2013, the time taken to get to Ser A fell to about 1.5 years with a similar number of average rounds to Ser A as in 2012. Things of course, turned a lot better for the 2014 and 15 vintages, where it took much less than 12 months to get to Ser A from seed and correspondingly the vast majority of companies that got to Series A did it with just one seed round injection.
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