As the saying goes, “What’s in a name? That which we call a Series A by any other name would smell as sweet.” Er… something like that, right? Hmmm, maybe it went a little bit differently.
But whatever it be, or not to be😊, the Seed Round is the new Series A. Clearly. I think we’ve all felt it for sometime but the data is in and the good ‘ole Series A just don’t buy what it used to. Nahhh… the Seed round does that, and it may buy more (equity) than it used to as a Series A (more data hunting and crunching required but one gets a sense that the venture capitalists are, well, capitalizing).
Labiotech does a really nice job collecting and summarizing a variety of topics related to financings and dealmaking in the biotech sector and the 2024 breakdown of funding offers the following approximations (roughly, with some rounding made by this author):
The internal breakdowns for amounts invested look like this:
Readers of this corner will know that we keep a close eye on the XBI
As usual, the outliers can skew the numbers (more on this in a moment) but the median amounts invested into these rounds puh-rihhhty much drive the nail in the coffin of the old thinking about Series dynamics. This data could be charted in another way in which an inverted bell curve would appear and a GAPING hole between $20M and $50M would stare back at you. Think about that for a moment… if you can’t get to value inflection for ~$15-20M, you better be raising $60-75M and have multiple reasons to do so as a cursory view of the companies listed in the dataset further indicates that the lower outliers (sub-median) on the Series A were generally geared for “finding out” about a single asset in the clinic.
Back to that previously mentioned outlier that can skew the averages… it also happens to bring even more of a spotlight to those famed words from Shakespeare which began this Corner on Market Sentiments. One of the companies in the 2024 data set raised a whopping $100,000,000 … as a Seed Round!! Indeed, a rose by any other name…
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