1d ago
Excited to share our 2025 State of Seed Retrospective
Each year we look back at companies that raised two years prior and benchmark what how that investment vintage has performed
Let's see how the 2023 cohort has fared...
3/ Out of that cohort, fewer than 1% (just 5 tokens) hit a Fully-Diluted Valuation (FDV) over $1B: Ethena ($6.9B), Story ($5.5B), MYX Finance ($2.7B), Pudgy Penguins ($1.6B) and Kaito ($1B).
4/Bigger early checks didn’t necessarily translate into better outcomes. The relationship between seed check size and token valuation is weak (R² ≈ 0.2).
5/ Follow-on funding improved: ~25% of the 2023 seed teams raised additional rounds (versus ~12% for 2022). But overall fewer seed rounds happened.
6/ Token launches remain hard: Only ~15% of 2023 vintage teams (after 2+ years of building) have launched a token — essentially flat with 2022.
7/ Sector divergence: Emerging areas like DePIN & AI stood out. DePIN projects shipped fast (>90% delivered product within 2 years), while fewer than half of AI-teams have shipped yet (owing to deeper tech build).
8/ Ecosystem-level nuance: The Solana ecosystem raised fewer seed deals in 2023 but had higher follow-on and lower failure rates. Contrast: the Ethereum ecosystem had many teams but average follow-on/failure stats.
9/ Fund behavior: Among venture funds doing seed in crypto, concentrated portfolios (<10 deals) showed the widest variation in outcomes — some funds got 50-60% follow-on hit-rates. Larger portfolios converge nearer to ~30-40%.
10/ The report emphasizes caution—momentum sectors like prediction markets may resemble past hype waves (NFTs etc). Meanwhile, stablecoins, payments and yield-products continue to show clearer product-market fit and might be under-hyped.
11/ Conclusion: Despite a challenging start, 2023’s seed vintage still has ~$0.92 of every invested dollar “still at work” (i.e., not written off yet). The big winners matter, but the broader class is still maturing.
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