In the blog post announcing changes at SV Angel last week, the SV Angel partners wrote:
The amount of money raised in seed rounds has doubled and valuations have increased significantly.
I thought I’d go back over the last three USV funds and see what I could learn about the market from our experience.
Since raising our third early-stage fund in 2012, we have led or co-led 16 seed rounds, 31 Srs A rounds, and 8 Srs B rounds, for a total of 55 new USV portfolio companies over the last six years.
I put all of that data into a google sheet this morning and this is what I learned:
The average pre-money valuation for a seed round has gone from $5-10mm in the 2012 time frame to $10-15mm in the 2017 time frame and the average amount raised in seed rounds has gone from $2.5mm in the 2012 time frame to over $4mm in the 2017 time frame.
The average pre-money valuation for a Srs A round has gone from $10-15mm in the 2012 time frame to $22-$27mm in the 2017 time frame and the average amount raised in Srs A rounds has not changed very much. It still averages around $5-7mm.
We have not been leading or co-leading many Srs B rounds in the last three years so my data on that market is not good enough to come to any conclusions there.
USV invests in North America and Europe and our largest density is in NYC and the Bay Area. This data is averaged across all of those markets and so it could be off significantly for a specific market. We find the Bay Area to be the most expensive place to invest and Europe to be the least expensive.
I think the comment made by the SV Angel partners is correct, at least directionally so. What this means for returns for angel and early-stage investors remains to be seen. Right now the angel and VC sector is producing great returns, but those are driven off of investments made in the 2005-2010 era for the most part and we have yet to see what the returns for the 2010-2015 cohort will deliver and we are a long way from knowing how the 2015-2020 era will turn out.
