I came across two interesting charts that capture from different angles how the venture capital market has cooled down after the unsustainable peak of 2021. That peak was driven by the pandemic’s digital euphoria and the flood of liquidity injected by central banks around the world.

For context, a Series Seed round is typically the first institutional funding a startup receives—usually from venture capital funds—to build a product and find early traction. A Series A round comes next, aiming to scale the business once there’s some proof of concept.

The first chart comes from Carta and focuses on the U.S. market. It shows the percentage of seed-stage startups that managed to raise a Series A within two years. The trend is striking: for companies that raised seed in 2018 and 2019, between 30% and 42% made it to Series A in two years. But for those that raised in 2021 and 2022, that figure drops to between 12% and 19%. The fall is steep across all sectors, even traditionally solid ones like SaaS and Healthtech.

Interestingly, some sectors like Biotech and Hardware appear more resilient, likely reflecting longer development cycles and more specialized investor pools less affected by general market sentiment.

In short, fundraising has become significantly harder—not just for Series A, but across the board.

The second chart, produced by Endeavor, shows the same story in Latin America, this time looking at total capital deployed per year from 2019 to 2024 across major markets. We see how funding spiked in 2021 and then collapsed in 2022, with further declines in 2023. In 2024, Mexico, Argentina, and Chile appear to have stabilized around 2019 levels. Brazil and Colombia, on the other hand, are still lagging behind pre-pandemic volumes.

Brazil’s 2021 boom was in a league of its own, which may explain why its correction has been steeper and its recovery slower.

I’m optimistic we’ll see an uptick in 2025 based on the momentum we’ve seen in the market over the past few months. Several funds—including mine, Dalus Capital—have been actively backing outstanding founders in this tougher environment. Still, I’m looking forward to seeing the hard data once the first-half stats are out. Macro uncertainties—especially the risk of tariff wars—continue to weigh on the renewed optimism we saw earlier in the year.