ratings have been This year it’s a top priority for the entire venture industry as many VCs try to navigate their overvalued portfolios and founders scramble to save cash and grow to their high valuations.

So you could have predicted that valuations would fall off a cliff this year. But that didn’t happen, because venture investing isn’t that simple.

Let’s look at the numbers first: According to PitchBook data, the median pre-money valuation of the seed deal in the United States was $10.5 million, up from $9 million last year. The median early stage valuation through the third quarter of this year was $55 million, compared to $44 million last year. The median late-stage valuation was $91 million, up from $100 million in 2021.

It may seem silly that valuations continue to rise in some phases – especially after investors pretended to be crazy to come in at last year’s prices, and in some ways they do – but it also makes a lot of sense .

Kyle Stanford, a senior venture capital analyst at PitchBook, told australiabusinessblog.com that we shouldn’t forget those record levels of dry powder, for example.

“There has been such a growth in the past few years of the multi-stage investors or Andreessen [Horowitz] and Sequoia who have billions of dollars investing early on,” Stanford said. “The amount of capital still available for the early phase is still very high and many investors are still willing to put top dollars into deals.”