Fair enough.

Since the rise of of on-demand data centers and software eating the world, Series A is the new Series B, and they expect some commercializable prototype (MVP) and customer traction before they'll talk to you.

So, even though Series A used to be called "Early stage" financing, I'm not sure it's fair to include it in what we used to call early stage any more.

So, to your question: sticking with angel/fund/corp seed, I don't know - maybe $10B or so in the US? You're right - that's pretty tiny. VC as an entire asset class is pretty tiny in the grand scheme of things (certainly very tiny for the amount of press it generates).

I'll take a look into the data this weekend, but I would guess that I'm in the ballpark of a binary order of magnitude with that guesstimate. Close enough to zero to make scrounging for it painful, I agree.

>Series A is the new Series B, and they expect some commercializable prototype (MVP) and customer traction before they'll talk to you

No, that's not even good enough. Even if you have a product in the market, with traction, if it's not millions of MAU/DAU then welp you're SOL. Doesn't matter what technology you built or how good your team is.

The only caveat to that is if you, as a founder, are already a known entity to the venture funds with a previous exit or in the right social network.

Well, my point was that while, yes, it's easier (cheaper, faster) to build and market a product than it was 20 years ago, the criteria for an investment has moved right along with it. I mean - gosh - Sun was funded based on a napkin drawing. (It was already developed paid-for Stanford-developed technology, though, so declaring it to have been funded simply off just a napkin is unfair)

Currently I have a thing that is kinda/sorta like a B2B SaaS play, with bottom-up engagement directly with the employees of the target enterprise -- and I've had to shut the doors to (unnecessary) investor interest w/ only about 3K active users.

But, underneath it all the distracting details, I agree. I think the general consensus in this thread is: it's hard.

So I would agree that $10B in seed funding is next to zero, and yes, that is my point, however I think you are overestimating it by a (decimal) order of magnitude, and that is worldwide. I think worldwide there was less than $1B in seed funding in any year. That should be easier to falsify if you can do so! I would be interested in your data sources or methodology if you succeed in showing this.

That's an interesting claim!

I will go see what I can see. As for a starting point, I'll probably dig around CB insights, pitchbook, angellist, and the Center for Venture Research at UNH (New Hampshire). Then go from there.

If you are right, that's a very very interesting result.

all right! Definitely please don't include series A but personally I'm not sure whether I should consider kickstarter and co to be seed rounds - maybe? I am very curious about what you find in the sources you've already mentioned (without including series A rounds), though, and hope you will give an update!

I hadn't even thought of including kickstarter-and-friends, partly because the companies aren't selling equity. I'm not including any sort of corporate spin-out either.

The lines have gotten so blurry compared to 20 years ago (entrepreneural creativity in action?), so sorting out the wheat and chaff is harder. More data - less definition.

The thread is deep (as you say in this comment's sibling), so I will email the longer commentary...

Briefly, most of the published analysis is top-down and less is bottom-up. People seem to bundle Seed+Series-A in most places. There's a lot of talk about medians without a deal-count. There are counts for numbers of deals with a size exceeding some threshold, but that doesn't give us what we're looking for.

Here's a chart - US only: - https://files.pitchbook.com/images/Angel.Seed%20Activity.png

At about a thousand deals at about a million bucks, that's bumping the $1B mark, but doesn't break $2B.

fair enough! I'll check this thread and see if you update it, if you do have time to look more :)

Also if you'd like you can email me at the address in my profile, this thread is getting nested very deep.

You're right. It's way less than $10B (which was already nothing, in the grand scheme of things).

I'm trying to figure out how low it actually goes...