SaaStr 799: The Series A Landscape in 2025: Insights from Chemistry VC's Ethan Kurzweil
SaaStr 799: The Series A Landscape in 2025: Insights from Chemistry VC's Ethan Kurzweil
SaaStr CEO and Founder Jason Lemkin and Ethan Kurzwiel, previously partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and now founding partner at Chemistry VC, took us through a deep dive of exactly where Series A funding is right now in 2025.
Current State of Early-Stage Venture Market The early-stage venture landscape has experienced significant shifts since the peaks of 2021. We're seeing:
Deal activity decline: From the highs of 2021 (around 3.5B raised in Q4 2021), we're seeing a return to baseline levels but still below pre-zero interest rate era volumes.
Longer funding timelines: Seed to Series A timelines have stretched from approximately 12 months to 25 months on average, requiring founders to plan for longer runways.
More capital into fewer deals: While total capital deployment is returning to pre-2021 levels, it's being concentrated in fewer companies, making the environment more binary and competitive.
Graduation rates plummeting: The percentage of seed companies successfully raising Series A has dropped significantly across all industries, creating a "crunch" for many startups.
Listen in for more!
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Ethan Kurzweil on Venture Investing in the Post-ZIRP, AI Era
In the 2010s, we saw an incredible boom in the venture capital space, fueled in part by cheap capital as well as cheap compute. Fast forward to today, and many things look very different. We're not in the ZIRP era anymore. And computing power has become a scarce resource, particularly when it comes to AI. So how do things look different today from the perspective of a veteran venture capitalist? In this episode, recorded live in San Francisco in November, we speak to Ethan Kurzweil, a founder and managing partner at the new VC firm Chemistry. Ethan spent years at Bessemer Venture Partners, where he was involved in numerous software deals. He talks to us about his strategy for the new fund, the case for starting a small firm, what technologies excite him most right now, and the general landscape for seed-stage investing.
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Ethan started his career when the marquee tag was king and is bullish on its comeback.
His focus as an investor is on developer tools & infrastructure, open source software, space, and emerging compute.
We talk about his time as a Product Group Leader at Facebook, and his strong feelings on the state of DevOps.
You can find his investor profile here, his blog here, and on Twitter here.
Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Denys Vuika, who answered the question: How do I configure Yarn as the default package manager for Angular CLI?
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20VC: Bessemer's Ethan Kurzweil on How To View Pattern Recognition and Deal With The Anti-Portfolio, The Next Frontier In Developer Focussed Businesses & Why eSports Is Interesting Again
Ethan Kurzweil is a Partner @ Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the world leading venture funds with prior investments including the likes of Skype, LinkedIn, Yelp and Pinterest just to name a few. As for Ethan, he focuses on consumer facing technology and developer platforms having made investments in the likes of Twitch, Periscope and Dropcam on the consumer side and Twilio, Intercom and SendGrid on the developer platform side, just to name a few from his outstanding portfolio.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Ethan made his entrance into the world of venture and came to be a partner @ Bessemer?
2.) What was the developer roadmap that Ethan established a couple of years ago? Why was it controversial at the time? How have we seen this play out and come into fruition? What is the next frontier in developer focussed businesses?
3.) Ethan has previously said, 'history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme'. How does Ethan view pattern recognition? How does Ethan look to avoid biases and escape the echo chamber of Silicon Valley?
4.) How does Ethan see the world of eSports evolving? From an investment perspective, where does the equity value creation lie; the brands being built or the core underlying technology?
5.) Bessemer publishes their anti-portfolio, why is this? What does one need to take away when assessing the opportunities they have missed? How can one build a process of self-reflection around the anti-portfolio?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Ethan's Fave Book: The Namesake
Ethan's Fave Blog: Nuzzel
Ethan's Most Recent Investment: Periscope Data
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ethan on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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