Cursor · Yann LeCun · OpenAI · Crunchbase News
The Billion-Dollar Seed Isn’t The Deal You Think It Is
Compiled by KHAO Editorial — aggregated from 1 source + 3 references discovered via search. See llms.txt for citation guidance.
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Everywhere you look, venture headlines imply that seed rounds have meaningfully changed shape.
Key facts
- Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins each turned roughly $12.5 million of their Google checks into around $4 billion, driving reported returns somewhere north of 300x
- The team pulled every publicly available $100 million-plus first round they could find over the last 15 years (roughly 200 deals) and found that only 20% had recorded exits
- The number of $50 million-plus seed rounds has exploded since 2018
- According to reports, first-round investors are looking at 30-40x returns at OpenAI’s projected IPO valuations
Summary
Yann LeCun raised $1 billion for a company that didn’t exist a week earlier. It’s easy to read those headlines and conclude the venture model has been rewritten, that AI is a once-in-a-generation opportunity requiring once-in-a-generation capital. At Bison Ventures, they've built deep domain expertise in biotech, the sector with the longest history of mega first rounds in venture. Biotech mega-seeds are common because the science requires it, you can’t run a Phase 1 trial on $3 million, but the return profile is often humbling.