If you're looking for data showing that the party is over for early-stage startups, take a look at these two charts published by CB Insights this morning.
The third quarter saw record venture capital dollars invested, across the smallest number of deals the VC industry has seen since the second quarter of 2013. The checks are bigger, but they're going to a far smaller number of companies.
And, fewer and fewer of those checks are being written at the seed stage.
Seed-stage investing's share of VC deals is down to 28 percent, from 35 percent at this time last year. Meanwhile, Series A and Series B investments are up as a share of the total deal number--sort of.
The 16% of this past quarter's 1,799 deals (288) that were done at the Series B stage are not more than the 15% of 1,977 deals (297) done at the Series B a year ago this time. In fact, they are less.
This isn't that different from what Mattermark pointed to in September, only it's worse. There's a proportional widening of the share of deals done at Series A and Series B, as the glut of seed investments from 2014 and earlier moves into later stages. The pie's growing and the slices are getting bigger, but there is less room at the table.
Here's what that looked like in Massachusetts, which followed the quarterly trend.
