Investor ROI analysis is a quantitative model that maps when each fundraising round turns profitable across price scenarios, relative to that round's vesting cliff. It reveals the windows of peak sell-pressure risk and confirms that no round becomes profitable before its cliff expires.
When a round turns profitable the moment its cliff releases, that is not a cliff, it is a scheduled sell event written into the unlock schedule.
How it is calculated
Break-even price for a round equals the entry price divided by any applicable TGE unlock fraction, adjusted for the share of tokens already unlocked at each later month. A seed investor who paid $0.05 and receives 10% at TGE with the rest vesting over 24 months has a different break-even curve than a Series A investor who paid $0.20 with a 12-month cliff.
Plotting all rounds on one chart immediately shows where profit windows cluster and where several rounds could be selling at the same time.
Design consequence
A well-designed vesting schedule ensures no round reaches break-even before its cliff expires. When a seed round is priced at $0.02 and the TGE listing price is $0.30, even a 5% TGE unlock puts seed investors at 15x from day one. The fix is not lowering the listing price; it is extending the cliff or cutting the TGE unlock so break-even arrives after the cliff.
Common mistake
Building a vesting schedule that looks reasonable in a table but is never modeled against investor break-even across scenarios. A 12-month cliff sounds long until you realize that at a 20x listing premium, those investors are profitable the moment the cliff releases. The analysis makes that visible before launch instead of after.
See Token Allocation and Vesting Design for how this applies in practice.
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