It’s no secret that the bar for startups to land a Series A has risen, but has it risen too high? According to Jenny Fielding, a co-founder and Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, startups are facing what she calls “The Series A Chasm.” In a post on X this month, Fielding said, “there’s a huge backlog of seed stage companies with nice traction – just not $3m ARR + 30% MOM growth kinda traction.” The post sparked a conversation online, and Fielding joined Haje Kamps on Equity to talk through it all. 

Looking beyond Fielding’s portfolio, we can see that the early stage storm has been brewing for quite some time. According to data from Crunchbase, seed companies have raised about $7 billion so far this year, which is down $1 billion year over year and down significantly in the later stages. Crunchbase has even taken to calling this a moment of “extended adolescence” for startups, with an increase in companies raising $5 million+ seed rounds instead of a Series A. 

Of course, this meant we had to address the AI elephant in the room, and the $135 million seed round Musk’s xAI raised last December. Note that after 6 months, the company behind Grok has already announced a $6 billion Series B round. It was an interesting chat, so press play and join the conversation!

Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.

Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.