The State of U.S. Early-Stage Venture & Startups: 2022
Venture performance declined slowly, and then suddenly in 2022.
Jan 17, 2023 — 2 min read
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- 2Q22 represents the largest single-quarter decline in venture capital performance (deal volume and tenor) ever observed in our dataset.
- Activity rate fell by 2.3% and markup rate fell by 5.5% over the previous quarter.
- Median valuations increased at Series A and held steady at pre-seed and seed.
- The share of later-stage deals on AngelList decreased in 2Q22, while the share of seed-stage deals increased.
- Despite the broader crypto market decline, Web3 startups on AngelList continued to capture the largest share of deals and capital deployed in 2Q22.
- Startup spend continued to increase in 2Q22, but payroll spend growth slowed.
- Read all our findings in our 2Q22 State of U.S. Early-Stage Venture & Startups report.
2022 began with fears of a downturn in the early-stage market after the historic highs of 2021, and ended with those fears fully realized. Activity rate (the share of startups that raised a round or exited) and positive activity (the share of startups that raised a round or exited at a valuation increase) fell by 5 percentage points in 2022 over the previous year—but that stat obscures the severity of the decline in the latter half of 2022.
4Q22 ended with a positive activity rate of 67%, a 17 percentage point decline from the start of the year. 4Q22’s activity rate of 7.4% was a from 1Q22. In short, fewer startups went out to raise in the latter half of 2022, and of those that did, a significantly smaller percentage raised at a markup.
