Analysis
LvlUp Ventures reviewed roughly 25,000 seed-stage applications over the past year, including 2,500 in a single recent month, and found the criteria that predict which companies survive have shifted meaningfully from what worked two or three years ago, according to a Crunchbase News column by the firm's co-founder and general partner, Aaron Golbin.
What Used To Be Enough
Golbin's framing is direct: previously, a strong product, a credible team and a well-built pitch deck were sufficient to raise a seed round. That is no longer the case. The firm's current evaluation weights distribution architecture over product alone, learning velocity over raw speed of execution, and founder focus -- the ability to describe a business in "one tight sentence" -- as a differentiator investors can now screen for at volume because AI has made it cheap to build a plausible-looking product regardless of whether the underlying distribution strategy works.
“## What Used To Be Enough Golbin's framing is direct: previously, a strong product, a credible team and a well-built pitch deck were sufficient to raise a seed round.”
The AI-Adoption Number
78% of founders applying to LvlUp now use AI in at least one part of their startup -- a figure that has likely climbed sharply from where it stood even a year or two ago, though the column doesn't provide a historical baseline for direct comparison. That number matters less as a standalone statistic than as context for why the other criteria have shifted: when nearly four in five applicants are AI-native by default, "we use AI" stops functioning as a differentiator in a pitch and investors have to screen on execution quality instead.
The Survival Number
The most concrete data point in the piece is that companies with strong go-to-market foundations in their original pitch decks had an 82% survival rate one year later. That's a specific, testable claim rather than a vague heuristic, and it reframes distribution planning as a diligence category with a measurable outcome attached -- closer to how investors already treat metrics like burn multiple or net revenue retention.
What This Means For Founders
The practical takeaway for founders raising seed rounds now is that a working AI-powered product is closer to table stakes than a pitch, and the actual differentiation investors are screening for is a credible, specific distribution plan -- not a generic "we'll do content marketing and partnerships" slide, but a tested channel with early signal attached. Non-dilutive capital alongside equity, for companies with revenue visibility, is also increasingly part of how sophisticated seed investors structure deals rather than defaulting to pure equity every time.
The limitation worth flagging: this is one firm's applicant pool and internal underwriting criteria, not an industry-wide census, and LvlUp's own investment thesis shapes what it screens for and therefore what patterns it notices. A firm with a different sector focus or check size might report a different shift entirely. Still, a 25,000-application sample size is large enough that the qualitative shift Golbin describes -- from product-and-pitch to distribution-and-execution -- is probably directionally right even if the exact percentages are specific to LvlUp's own funnel.