Is Seed Stage Investing Going Extinct in Venture

Author:

Peter Walker

Published date:

May 29, 2026

Seed investing is squeezed from above by multi-stage capital and from below by larger angels, making the traditional seed model increasingly difficult.

Is seed stage investing going extinct?

And if not, why does the atmosphere around seed feel so damn anxious?

Loved getting to sit down with Rob Go of NextView to dig into details on seed.

We covered a ton of ground, but the focus was on a now-familiar refrain: this just isn’t what seed investing used to be. Seed is squeezed from the top by multi-stage capital players and from the bottom by large accelerator cohorts.

It’s supposed to be the land of non-consensus, yet predictability is all over today.

So much angst, so little time :)

I particularly liked Rob’s analogy to horror filmmaking and the success of Blumhouse, not as a paradigm for what seed investors currently do but as a thought exercise about creating a durable franchise of doubles instead of home-runs in VC. Not sure that’s possible but I liked the brain wave.

One of my favorite conversations on the pod in a long time! Listen here: https://lnkd.in/eAauddts

Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project.

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