Three Series A rounds priced above $200M post in April. Plus the one that did not.

Series A median post-money in April: $42M. The median is the boring number; the tail is where the year is. Three Series A rounds in April closed at $200M post or higher. Two of them are AI-infrastructure plays (an inference-platform company at $260M post and a vector-database competitor at $215M post). The third is an applied-AI legal product at $230M post. All three were led by funds that have led similarly-priced rounds in the same quarter, which tells you the price level is not idiosyncratic; it is a market.

The shared term-sheet feature: all three rounds carry a 1.5x liquidation preference on the Series A. That is a step up from the 1x non-participating that has been standard since 2014. It is not as aggressive as the 3x participation in the OpenAI round, but it is in the same direction.

The one that did not

The fourth-most-talked-about Series A in April is one that almost priced at $250M post and did not. The company — a developer-tools startup whose founder I will not name on background — held a partner meeting at a top-decile fund that walked the meeting through the deck, the deal memo, and the founder's competitive positioning. The partners voted 4 to 3 against. The disclosed reason: the fund's prior portfolio company in the space had not gracefully accepted the conflict, and the GP leading the deal could not get the meeting unanimous on Sunday before the term sheet was supposed to go out Monday.

The company eventually closed a smaller round (~$120M post) with a different lead. The founders are happy. The original GP, who I have known for six years, is not. The interesting feature of the story is not the price; it is the partner meeting. In a market where Series A is being priced at five times the median, the deal that does not close at top-of-market because of a conflict the GP could not resolve is the story that tells you the most about how funds are actually operating right now.

In a market where Series A medians are 5x dispersed, the story is not the deals that priced. It is the ones that did not.

The four GPs at competing funds I spoke with this week, all on background, agreed: Series A pricing is bifurcating, and the bifurcation is being driven by a smaller number of funds writing the largest checks. The follow-on round in twelve months will be the test of whether that pricing is sustainable. We will know more in April 2027.