Are “Consensus” Seed Rounds Better?

We looked at more than 6,000 startup financings in our results, an average of nearly 1,000 per year, or about 600 deals per decile-valuation bucket. A dataset with real breadth and no silent failures disappearing from view.

Do “Consensus” Deals Graduate More Often?

PitchBook claims consensus deals (those in the top valuation decile) graduate to Series A at 50%+, versus <30% for everyone else.

Our closest analog is markups: whether the company ever raises a priced round at a ≥10% higher price per share. It’s not the same as Series A graduation, but it’s the best non-biased outcome metric we have.

Our result:

• Consensus deals: 54.9% are ever marked up
• Non-consensus: 48.5%

So: yes, a modest uplift—not the yawning 20+ point chasm PitchBook reports.

Do More Expensive Deals have Higher Returns?

PitchBook’s evidence for returns relies on two shaky constructs:

1. “Failure rate.” Most startups don’t “fail” cleanly—they linger as zombies. Success rates are well-defined; failure rates aren’t.
2. Trimmed average MOIC ("multiple on invested capital", or “return multiple”). A metric that is still influenced by outliers yet doesn’t map to investor experience.

We use two more robust measures: markups, and “big winners” (≥ 10x MOIC).

Markups

The chart below shows the fraction of Seed deals currently marked up (MOIC ≥ 1.1x) by valuation decile.

There is an upward slope—but it’s modest.

Decile 1 is marked up at a 29.4% rate. Decile 10 - the “Consensus” deals - are at 42.2%.

The slope is real but gentle. If consensus rounds really were twice as likely to “succeed,” we’d expect a cliff. Instead, we get a polite incline.

This upward slope could also be an artifact of the what we call a markup. Only priced equity rounds can create markups, not SAFEs. Whether SAFEs raised at a higher valuation cap represent a “markup” is a frequent topic of debate in the early-stage venture capital world. For now, AngelList consistently takes the more conservative position that only priced equity rounds trigger the share-price changes that could result in markups.

A company that has raised priced equity in the past is more likely to raise a priced equity round in the future, as opposed to SAFEs or notes. And startups at higher valuation deciles are generally more likely to raise priced equity rounds at Seed; here’s the data on percent of Seed deals that raise priced equity by valuation decile:

It’s not a perfect match for our markup result but you can see the upward slope along with the same curious spike around typical deals (bucket “5”). Put another way, there are two effects here, both real:

• Higher-priced rounds are more likely to get marked up, and
• Startups that raise priced equity are more likely to do another priced equity round (typically at a markup), and priced equity rounds are more frequently used for the most expensive deals.

We analyzed markups because of the large gap PitchBook suggested between “consensus” and “non-consensus” investments, which we are not able to replicate. But markups don’t drive returns: returns in Seed investing are driven by big winners. Let’s look at those next.

Big Winners

Here’s the fraction of Seed deals that hit MOIC ≥ 10x.

Now the illusion collapses completely:

• The 10x winners are chaos with no valuation pattern.
• The top-decile deals are fifth place.
• The bottom-decile are sixth.
• The right tail floats freely across buckets.

If you’re looking for a “consensus magic,” there isn’t any. High-valuation rounds do not disproportionately mint outliers in our data.

What the Unbiased Data Actually Says

Across our results, you get a consistent pattern:

1. The consensus premium is real, but small. Expensive rounds reflect stronger signals, and those signals have some predictive value. But the effect size is mild.
2. The extreme outcomes do not concentrate in pricey rounds. The 10x winners—the ones that matter—don’t care what you paid at Seed. The companies raising at higher valuations may be substantially better companies but not necessarily substantially better investments.

The World Model That Fits the Data

Here’s what we think is happening:

Founders absorb most of the value of positive signals. Pedigree, traction, narrative—all get capitalized into price.

But investors still get some benefit from those signals. A startup’s positive signals are priced in but not fully priced in. So better, more expensive deals generally are a little bit better to invest in.

The market is noisy, which is a sign of efficiency. Returns are chaotic and unpredictable, even if you have a slight edge. You can’t mint big winners by paying up for the best deals or by only looking for low entry prices.

Power laws in venture returns: A technical explanation. This is all closely tied in to our model of a “credible” Seed deal that was so crucial to the power-law results of our 2019 whitepaper Startup Growth and Venture Returns. As you go down the list of Seed-stage startups from “best” to “worst”, entry prices get cheaper but exit distributions fall off even faster. At a certain point - the “credible deal threshold” - the exit distributions drop off enough that winning startups are no longer drawing their returns from an alpha < 2 power law. Consequently, broad indexing is no longer defensible from a “make more investments, get higher average returns” perspective.

The Takeaways

1. PitchBook’s dramatic consensus premium is probably a data artifact. In a dataset without survivorship bias, the sky-high gap disappears.
2. Expensive seeds are slightly better, not fundamentally different. You get a higher rate of follow-on markups, not a fundamentally different universe.
3. The big wins are unpredictable across valuation space. There’s no obvious, predictable, arbitrageable link between Seed valuation and “home run” returns.
4. Seed pricing is broadly efficient. This is the surprising part: PitchBook is right about the conclusion but likely wrong about the mechanism.
   Efficiency emerges not from the difficulty of accessing magical consensus rounds, but from founders pricing signals correctly and the market largely matching risk to return. Consensus rounds aren’t miracle rounds. They’re just expensive rounds with good signals—priced almost correctly.