03
Valuations
Pricing the
next cycle
Valuations rose across stages in 2025, but the market was split. Select late-stage leaders commanded premium pricing while ownership stakes tightened, resulting in a market that sometimes felt noisy and reactive.
Valuations increased across venture in 2025, reflecting a renewed appetite for risk and the pull of capital to category leaders. Round sizes expanded, but ownership – particularly in competitive, high-demand companies – tightened. The result was a market where pricing often appeared aggressive on the surface, even as capital deployment remained selective beneath it.
PitchBook data shows broad-based median increases. Median pre-money valuations reached $16 million at the Seed stage, $49 million at Series A, $145 million for Series B, $316 million for Series C, and $857 million at Series D and beyond. Importantly, medians rose even as total capital was skewed by a small number of very large financings – most notably OpenAI’s $40 billion raise – making averages less representative of the typical company experience than medians.
The key dynamic in 2025 was dispersion.
A relatively small number of breakout companies set pricing benchmarks for entire stages. For these leaders, valuations were supported by growth durability, improving public comps, and investor competition. For the broader market, however, pricing discipline remained. Many companies raised flat or modest up rounds, and where step-ups were difficult to justify fundamentally, investors relied more heavily on structure.
Median Pre-Money Values
Increased Across Stages
| Stage | 2024 | 2025 | Increase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $14M | $16M | ↑ 14.3% |
| Series A | $40M | $49M | ↑ 22.51% |
| Series B | $106M | $145M | ↑ 36.8% |
| Series C | $225M | $316M | ↑ 40.4% |
| Series D+ | $616M | $857M | ↑ 39.1% |
AI was the primary force behind this widening gap. Artificial intelligence and machine learning captured 65.6%, or $222 billion, of all VC deal value in 2025, up from 47.2% in 2024 and roughly 10% in 2015. Average AI/ML pre-money valuations increased meaningfully, pushed higher by late-stage leaders and scaled private companies. In practice, the market was pricing a small cohort as category leaders and treating much of the rest as optionality.
So were valuations reasonable or stretched?
For category leaders with durable growth and clear paths to liquidity, pricing was defensible and supported by capital scarcity at scale. For many others, valuations were more fragile – supported by narrative, structure, or competitive dynamics rather than sustained fundamentals.
Looking ahead, if IPO markets continue to stabilize, late-stage valuation support should strengthen for companies with clear revenue durability. However, dispersion is likely to widen further. Premium multiples will remain available for category leaders, but down rounds and tighter terms may persist for the median company, especially where growth is decelerating or where AI narratives outpace adoption.