PitchBook分析师指出：种子投资者应该逆势而上吗？（英）

1PitchBook Analyst Note: Should Seed Investors Ride the High and Pay the Price?Exploring the impact of seed-stage entry valuations on eventual returns PitchBook is a Morningstar company providing the most comprehensive, most accurate, and hard-to-find data for professionals doing business in the private markets.PitchBook Data, Inc.Nizar Tarhuni Executive Vice President of Research and Market IntelligenceDaniel Cook, CFA Global Head of Quantitative Research and Market IntelligenceZane Carmean, CFA, CAIA Director of Quantitative ResearchInstitutional Research GroupAnalysisSusan Hu Quantitative Research Analyst susan.hu@pitchbook.compbinstitutionalresearch@pitchbook.comPublishingDesigned by Drew SandersPublished on November 14, 2025ContentsKey takeaways• Top-decile seed rounds are priced around $40 million pre-money in 2025, nearly 3x the series median of $15 million. These deals absorb most of the capital and compress ownership stakes—around 20% versus 25% for typical seed rounds—as investors compete for exposure rather than value. As such, we refer to top-decile deals as “consensus” rounds.• Seed pricing appears broadly efficient. Across seed deals from 2006 to 2021 with exits observed through 2025, most deals, whether priced high or low, produced similar average deal-level return MOIC. The key difference lies in failure rates, with consensus seed rounds showing a 29.5% failure rate versus 39.4% in the rest of the market.• Consensus rounds deliver steadier outcomes and fewer outright losses, while also producing a slightly higher share of 10x-plus winners. Their median annualized return is roughly 35%—higher than the broader seed market—with most of that advantage driven by both lower loss rates and more right-tail outcomes.• IPO timelines have stretched from 7.5 to 9.4 years. Longer holding periods materially raise the bar for sustaining historical returns. For top consensus rounds in 2025, that difference can mean needing exit values of around $10 billion instead of $3 billion to achieve comparable performance. • Simulations show that paying up selectively, choosing only the highest-quality consensus deals, outperforms spray-and-pray diversification. Simulation seed portfolios build from deals entered between 2016 and 2021 and tracked through exits that achieved median MOICs of 3.8x, roughly double the 1.7x of the spray-and-pray portfolios. Key takeaways 1Introduction 2Defining the consensus 3Pricing efficiency at the seed stage 5Consensus risk and reward tradeoff 7Future exit implications 9Portfolio simulation by era 11Appendix 132Analyst Note: Should Seed Investors Ride the High and Pay the Price?IntroductionVenture investing begins with business uncertainty, and many early investments are made on the founding team alone. Stronger signals or early traction can drive rounds higher as investors converge and competition rises, creating an image of a “consensus” round—one that a broad cohort of investors believes will be a winner. Valuations o