Venture funding concentrated

Venture funding hit a record in early 2026, but most of the money went to a few giant artificial intelligence deals. (news.crunchbase.com) Crunchbase said investors put $300 billion into 6,000 startups worldwide in the first quarter of 2026, up more than 150% from both the prior quarter and a year earlier. Four companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Waymo — raised $188 billion combined, or 65% of the quarter’s total. (news.crunchbase.com) Artificial intelligence took $242 billion, or 80% of all global startup funding in the quarter, according to Crunchbase. The biggest checks went to frontier model makers and the infrastructure around them, not to the typical seed-stage software startup. (news.crunchbase.com) That split leaves two venture markets running at once: a headline market lifted by mega-rounds, and a broader market where dealmaking still looks tight. PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association said that if the five largest U.S. deals are excluded, first-quarter deal value drops 73.2%. (pitchbook.com) In the United States alone, PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association recorded $267.2 billion in first-quarter venture deal value, another quarterly high. But their report said the market beneath those top deals remained “largely unchanged from 2025,” with liquidity still tight and exits still difficult. (pitchbook.com) Crunchbase’s global data shows the money also narrowed geographically. U.S.-based startups raised $250 billion in the quarter, or 83% of the world total, while China ranked second at $16.1 billion and the United Kingdom third at $7.4 billion. (news.crunchbase.com) Investors and bankers are describing the same pattern in different datasets. J.P. Morgan, citing the PitchBook-National Venture Capital Association monitor, said the top five deals captured about three-quarters of first-quarter venture investment. (jpmorgan.com) The result is a record quarter that does not look like a broad venture rebound. The totals are real, but in early 2026 they were carried by a handful of companies large enough to reshape the entire market. (news.crunchbase.com)