Just over a year ago in our coverage of the 2019 venture capital market,  we noted that “United States-demarcated angel and seed deals dipped in 2019.” Our reporting concerning the Q1 2020 venture capital market had a similar tone, noting that “domestic seed rounds, in slow decline since peaks in 2017, have sharply fallen since Q3 2019.”

The same theme continued in the second quarter. Widening our lens to global seed data, we wrote that “global seed and angel deals [ … ] were down from 4,256 rounds in Q2 2019 worth $3.7 billion to 1,791 rounds worth just $2.3 billion in Q2 2020.”

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Of course, the second quarter of 2020 was the middle of the storm when it came to the temporary decline in venture capital confidence. So, what about Q3? One source noted, as we wrote at the time, that the “percentage of U.S. VC deals that were for rounds of $5 million or less was the lowest since at least 2010.” Another data source showed a slight rebound in domestic seed rounds, but it was a rare positive data point.

Then came Q4 2020 data and a full-year look at the market. We wrote that in “the U.S., seed deal count was high in 2020, around 5,227,” per that day’s data source.

Weird, right?

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