Do round labels convey meaningful information about a company's stage and risk?

Adam Besvinick · May 29, 2023

The label 'seed' has lost all meaning and round announcements convey no signal about the actual dynamics of a raise

A $7.3M 'seed' round is really a seed and an A combined, or two pre-seeds and a seed stacked together, so the headline number tells you nothing

30:14 20VC: Why Financial Models at Seed, $5M Seed Rounds & The Fear of Signalling Risk is all BS | Why Multi-Stage Firms Have Destroyed Seed & Who Wins and Who Loses in the Next 10 Years of Venture with Adam Besvinick, Founding Partner @ Looking Glass Capital

Cem Sertoglu · Nov 20, 2024

Round labels have become so fungible that analysing track record and mistakes by stage is difficult

What is called pre-seed, seed and Series A is all over the place — a $100M round at a $1B valuation announced as a seed is not a seed

30:01 20VC: Turning $16.5M into $2.1BN; Lessons from the Greatest Venture Investment in European History: UiPath | Why VC is Not Being Commoditised | Why Price Does Not Matter | Lessons on Loss Ratio, Selling and Signalling with Cem Sertoglu

Oren Zeev · Feb 2, 2026

Round labels are meaningless shorthand; investors should judge only whether the progress since the last round represents substantial real risk reduction rather than optics

You can call a round anything — two things called the same round can be very different — so the real question is whether early customer logos are a genuine signal of product-market fit or just noise

44:29 20VC: 50% of Funds Will Go Out of Business | Why Growth Expectations Today are BS and Will Not Last | Why Oren Zeev Takes $0 Management Fees But 30% Carry | Why GPs Should Not Tell LPs Their Strategy

Nico Wittenborn · May 22, 2023

Round labels like seed and Series A are arbitrary

Some of the seeds and some of the Series As he has done were at the same valuation

21:43 Seed and series a labels are arbitrary since valuations overlap