Director of Research

 partnered to capture valuation data from 124 completed pre-seed and seed rounds over the last two months. 

With this report, we aim to arm founders and funders with real-time information on how market conditions will affect their fundraising so that they can realize successful pre-seed and seed rounds.

Market conditions like these remind us why the expression “May you live in interesting times” is construed as more of a curse than a blessing. In light of interesting—said euphemistically, of course—macroscopic conditions, geopolitical turmoil, trouble in the metaverse, and a myriad of other maelstroms, it’s no fun to be an early-stage funder or founder right now.

That said, hard data has a way of dispelling flimsy sentiment. Contrary to Twitter’s screeching masses, deals are getting done and funds are being funded. More, trouble often begets tremendous opportunity. After all, per a 

Tom White

Examining Q4 2022 and Projecting to Q1 2023

Stonks x Forum Ventures Present: The State of Pre-seed & Seed Valuations

Stonks began as a simple remote demo day conducted over Zoom. Since our first event in late 2020, more than $120M has been wired to hundreds of companies on the platform.

Founders cannot build the future without 

, especially those that marry belief capital with financial capital at a company’s earliest stages. Of course, here we refer to 

Stonks 150, a list of the top 150 Angel Investors of 2022

Each and every one of these individuals has demonstrated a keen ability to identify a large quantity of quality startups and have played a crucial role in helping them grow and succeed.

From veteran entrepreneurs and savvy financiers to up-and-coming operators, this list includes a diverse range of individuals who have made a significant, indelible contribution to the world of early stage investing.

We will release the list in batches of 25 until the Final Countdown in mid-December. 

The Definitive Ranking of the 150 Most Active & Influential Angel Investors of 2022

Introducing The Stonks 150

Head of Private Markets

We’re thrilled to announce the Stonks YC S22 Access Fund portfolio. It has been an incredible experience and we plan to do more YC Access Funds like this in the future.

Here's a quick rundown of what you'll find below:

Adam Hardej

We invested in 35 companies from the YC S22 batch! Read about who they are and how we did it.

Stonks Y Combinator Access Fund Portfolio Announcement

Founder Ops

Not your Grandparents' Weekend Programming.

Introducing our new, fresh take on secondary markets, later-stage VC, and growth equity.

: alliteration and the creation of compelling content (see what we did there?). Unfortunately, there exists a real dearth of quality information and clean data about the machinations of private markets. With more companies staying private for longer, this leaves smaller investors at a real disadvantage:

potentially overpay for secondary shares of a hot, overvalued unicorn

Davis McCondichie

Episode #1 | Introducing Secondary Saturdays

Secondary Saturdays - 10/15

Founder and CEO

At Stonks, we’re focused on building the absolute best demo day experience in the world. We host nearly 200 demo days a year with partners like 500 Global, Techstars, Tachyon & others. Over 100 Unicorns have come from these partners’ demo days in the past — startups like Uber, Dropbox, Canva, Sendgrid, Carta, and Paypal.

Today, we’re excited to talk about our largest product release this year: 

 — a “Stripe-like” Express Checkout for Demo Days. This is the world’s fastest checkout flow to invest in startups; now integrated into Demo Days on Stonks. 

The Problem: Losing investors, lack of transactional tools

Investor excitement is at its highest during live demo days — but much of that interest is lost due to lack of integrated investing tools. Founders are stuck using a mash-up of 3rd-party tools to complete these workflows and this:

Ali Moiz

Introducing “Stripe-Checkout” for Startup Demo Days

 to democratize wealth creation, by letting anyone access VC-grade startup deal-flow. We opened up Demo Days to let investors anywhere access top-tier deals without being in Silicon Valley or exclusive, insider clubs.

By many measures, we’ve had a great 10 months — hosting 108 Demo Days, helping fund 1500 startups, $100M+ wired — all organic with no marketing.

But something founders said to me at our very first demo day (done on Zoom) was, 

“We actually prefer to pitch more privately. A smaller, curated audience is better than a larger, open one. ”

**Spoiler Alert: This is the largest change to the Stonks platform since we started.**

The Next Chapter for Stonks

Director of Engineering

At Stonks, we think Demo Days are one of the most exciting ways to bring founders and investors together and we’ve set out to build the ultimate Demo Day Platform; starting with how you host and run a demo day behind the scenes.

The power of running online demo days on Stonks:

 — Publish an event page and start collecting RSVPs

 — Build out your deals, founders, panelists, and more, all under one roof

Jack O'Brien

Introducing the Stonks Demo Day Dashboard,

Startup investing is limited to those who are 

, per SEC rules. Deals cannot be discussed or shared publicly, unless the startup or a qualifying platform is verifying accreditation. This has historically been a significant burden for both startups and platforms.

In 2021, the regulations were revised to make this significantly easier — verification of accreditation status now needs to be done only once every 5 years (vs every 3 months previously). We believe this massively reduces the operational burden for investors, startups and platforms.

To enable investors to take full advantage of this regulation change, 

 is now issuing Verified Accreditation Certificates to angel investors. This is 100% free — used to cost $250 with most CPAs.

Announcing Free, Cross-platform Accreditation for Angel investors

Key Takeaways:

Stonks raised $3m in a 60-minute pitch at our historic “Stonks Raises on Stonks” event

We watched our investor base spike with 279 new investors all while handling our own accreditation, signing and wiring.

We were stunned by the quality of investors that came inbound through our event without a single meeting — founders of unicorn companies, media moguls, GPs at top funds and many, many more.

The mission of Stonks has always been to democratize investing for all. It was always obvious to us that we should raise on our own platform, but what would that look like?

A few weeks ago, we secured our lead investor Andreessen Horowitz. That’s when the big question bubbled to the surface.

We watched our investor base spike with 279 new investors all while handling our own accreditation, signing and wiring.  We were stunned by the quality of investors that came inbound through our event without a single meeting — founders of unicorn companies, media moguls, GPs at top funds and many, many more.

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