Slice is how private investors go early.
The best returns don’t come from writing checks into big names. They come from getting in first.
Slice backs emerging managers before they become headlines.
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The Seed Round Is Dead. Long Live the Seed Round.
AI is exerting a deflationary force on the cost of starting and scaling a company. You can now build more, faster, with less. The bottleneck isn’t compute—it’s clarity. Talent remains scarce, but when paired with leverage, the right person is worth a team.
Startups used to raise to buy servers. Then the cloud made that cheap. Suddenly, you could spin up infrastructure with a credit card. The constraint shifted down the stack to people. That drove up salaries, pushed founders to dilute earlier, and led us into the era of $5M seed rounds. Now, AI is starting to do to labor what AWS did to hardware: abstract, accelerate, and commoditize.
What used to burn cash now scales with prompts and APIs.
Bolt got to a $700M valuation with 35 people. Replit went from <$10M to $100M+ ARR while shrinking headcount. These are no longer edge cases; they’re what the next wave of founders aspire to. The bar is higher, and the playbook is different.
This new generation is building leaner by default. They’ve internalized what the last cycle taught too late: dilution is expensive and mostly irreversible. If they’re raising, it’s because it’s strategic—not because they need the money.
That’s creating a bifurcation in the market. The best teams are raising less and doing more, which makes early entry more valuable and rarer. Pre-seed checks under $1M are up 17% YoY. In many cases, SAFE rounds under $500K are diluting less than 10%. For most, it’s below 5%.
AI-native teams are expected to hit product-market fit with $500K–$1M. A few are cashflow-positive on day one. These companies don’t need the traditional $2–3M seed round—and increasingly, they’re skipping it altogether. Especially if the capital doesn’t come with real value-add.
Pre-seed is the new seed. Meanwhile, the bloated ZIRP-era seed round is going extinct. That’s bad news for traditional seed funds stuck writing big checks into rounds that don’t want or need them. They’re left fighting multistage platforms for breakout access and losing.
The founders who can run the fastest mile don’t need convincing to raise big. They need a reason. And unless capital can meet them at their velocity and scale, it’ll miss the window completely.
If you’re an investor, this is the game now: write smaller checks earlier, or sit out the next wave of generational companies.
