Bradbury reports VC-backed companies raised $37 billion across roughly 2,856 deals in Q1 2023, with late-stage deals falling for a seventh straight quarter and even resilient angel and seed deals hitting a 10-quarter low, though the pace of decline is leveling off from 2022. Late-stage deals over $50 million fell to just 7.7% of all such deals versus a 14.6% average in 2022, and the ratio of capital demand to supply for late-stage founders hit a record $3.20 demanded for every $1 available, compared to a milder 1.6x for early-stage and 1.3x for venture-growth, prompting Y Combinator to shut its late-stage fund. Mega-deals over $100 million roughly returned to 2020 levels, led by Stripe's $6.5 billion Series I, a round that still came at a $45 billion haircut from its March 2021 $95 billion valuation, while seed-stage metrics improved, with median deal size rising to $3 million and median pre-money valuation to $13 million.

Founders raising a growth-stage round get a stark, quantified picture of exactly how scarce late-stage capital had become, the $3.20 demanded for every $1 available statistic gives a founder a concrete way to calibrate expectations before entering a fundraising process that will likely be far more competitive and slower than a prior round raised in 2021. The Stripe example is a useful real-world illustration of how even a category-defining company with strong fundamentals took a steep valuation cut to close a mega-round in this environment, which helps founders and investors set realistic benchmarks rather than assuming valuation resilience is reserved only for weaker companies. The improving seed-stage metrics amid a brutal late-stage market also gives early-stage founders and investors a useful counter-narrative to the dominant bear-market headlines, showing that capital scarcity was concentrated at specific stages rather than uniform across the entire venture funding lifecycle.