Venture Capital Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: Mia Scarlett, | Last updated: August 4, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Global venture funding reached $510 billion in the first half of 2026 — more than all of 2025 — yet two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, absorbed $217 billion of it. Axis Intelligence Research calculates a Venture Capital Concentration Index (VCCI) baseline reading of 66.1 for H1 2026, the first composite measure of how narrow this record actually is.
Quick Answer
Global venture funding hit a record $510 billion in H1 2026 ($305B in Q1, $205B in Q2), surpassing the $440 billion invested across all of 2025, according to Crunchbase. In the United States, PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association recorded $412.7 billion in H1 deal value, of which 87.5% went into financings of $100 million or more and 86% went to AI companies. Axis Intelligence Research’s Venture Capital Concentration Index (VCCI) reads 66.1 out of 100 as of June 30, 2026 — a baseline reading on a scale where 100 would mean every venture dollar goes to one company, one sector, one manager, one country.
Key Findings
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that stripping OpenAI and Anthropic out of the global H1 2026 total leaves $293 billion, equal to 66.6% of the full-year 2025 figure — a strong half, but not a record-breaking one.
- According to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, megadeals of $100 million or more captured 87.5% of the $412.7 billion deployed in the US in H1 2026, leaving roughly $51.6 billion for the rest of the market.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that North America took 76.9% of global H1 2026 venture dollars and Europe 8.2% — a 9.3-to-1 gap between the two regions on Crunchbase’s H1 totals of $392 billion and $42 billion.
- According to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, three firms — Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital and Founders Fund — took in 48.1% of all US venture capital raised in H1 2026, while first-time fund formation tracked toward its lowest level since 2016.
- Axis Intelligence Research’s Venture Capital Concentration Index reads 66.1 as of June 30, 2026, its baseline value, built from five disclosed inputs spanning company, deal-size, sector, manager and geographic concentration.
How Much Venture Capital Was Invested in 2026?
The first half of 2026 broke the all-time half-year record and did it in six months rather than twelve.
| Metric | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Global venture funding | $510B | H1 2026 | Crunchbase |
| Global venture funding | $305B | Q1 2026 | Crunchbase |
| Global venture funding | $205B | Q2 2026 | Crunchbase |
| Global venture funding | $440B | Full-year 2025 | Crunchbase |
| Previous half-year record | $375B | H2 2021 | Crunchbase |
| US VC deal value | $412.7B | H1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| US VC deal value | $267.2B | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| US VC deal value | $321.6B | Full-year 2025 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
Crunchbase’s H1 2026 global report, published July 2, 2026, put global funding at $510 billion across the half and described Q2 as the second-largest quarter on record behind Q1. The Q2 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, published July 8, 2026, put US deal value at $412.7 billion for the same period — already 28.3% above the $321.6 billion the US recorded across all of 2025.
A note on why we do not add these two numbers together. Crunchbase and PitchBook count different things: different round-type inclusions, different treatment of debt-and-equity mixes, different data-lag behaviour at seed. Axis Intelligence Research uses Crunchbase for global and regional shares and PitchBook-NVCA for US structure, and never merges the two into a single figure. Where a share is calculated, both numerator and denominator come from the same dataset.
Mia Scarlett, Business: Strip out the two line items that moved and the quarter looks like the one before it. OpenAI and Anthropic booked $217 billion of the $510 billion between them, per Crunchbase; the remaining $293 billion is roughly two-thirds of what the entire market did across all of 2025. That is a solid half-year, not a supercycle. The headline reads like revenue growth; the operating business underneath grew at a far more ordinary rate.
Global Venture Funding by Quarter, 2025–2026
| Quarter | Global funding | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 2026 | $305B | Largest quarter on record | Crunchbase |
| Q2 2026 | $205B | Across 5,000+ startups | Crunchbase |
| H1 2026 total | $510B | Prior half-year peak: $375B (H2 2021) | Crunchbase |
| Full-year 2025 | $440B | Exceeded in six months | Crunchbase |
What Is the Axis Venture Capital Concentration Index (VCCI)?
VCCI stands for Venture Capital Concentration Index. It is a composite built by Axis Intelligence Research that answers a question no single published statistic answers: how narrow is the venture market right now, across every dimension at once?
Deal value tells you how much money moved. It does not tell you how few companies, sectors, managers or countries it moved into. The VCCI does, on a 0–100 scale where 100 would describe a market in which every venture dollar goes to a single company, in a single sector, raised by a single firm, in a single country.
VCCI Components, Weights and Inputs (H1 2026)
| Component | What it measures | Value | Weight | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Company concentration | Share of global H1 funding to the top two companies (OpenAI, Anthropic) | 43.0% | 0.25 | Crunchbase |
| Deal-size concentration | Share of US H1 deal value in financings of $100M+ | 87.5% | 0.25 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Sector concentration | AI share of US venture dollars, H1 | 86.0% | 0.20 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Manager concentration | Share of US capital raised by the top three firms | 48.1% | 0.20 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Geographic concentration | US share of global Q2 venture dollars | 66.7% | 0.10 | Crunchbase |
The Formula
VCCI = (0.25 × 43.0) + (0.25 × 87.5) + (0.20 × 86.0) + (0.20 × 48.1) + (0.10 × 66.7)
= 10.75 + 21.875 + 17.20 + 9.62 + 6.67
= 66.1 (as of June 30, 2026)
Weights are set by how directly each dimension constrains a founder’s or an emerging manager’s access to capital. Company and deal-size concentration carry the heaviest weight because they determine whether a round of ordinary size can be raised at all; geography carries the lightest because capital crosses borders more easily than it crosses cheque sizes.
This is the index’s baseline reading. It describes H1 2026 and nothing else — there is no prior series, and the VCCI makes no claim about where concentration stood in earlier periods. Readings are recomputed each half-year from the same five inputs, and any change to components or weights will be disclosed and re-baselined rather than applied silently to past figures.
What the VCCI does not capture: secondaries and continuation vehicles, venture debt, and sovereign or corporate balance-sheet investment that never appears as a priced venture round. It also inherits the reporting lag that affects seed data in both underlying datasets.
Licensed CC BY 4.0. Cite as: Axis Intelligence Research, Venture Capital Concentration Index (VCCI), baseline reading 66.1, June 30, 2026.
Which Companies Took the Most Venture Capital in 2026?
Two names account for the shape of the entire year.
| Company | Amount raised | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI + Anthropic combined | $217B | H1 2026 | Crunchbase |
| Anthropic | $65B | Q2 2026 | Crunchbase |
| OpenAI | $122B | Q1 2026 | Crunchbase |
| Top five US deals | $195.6B | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
Crunchbase reports that close to a third of all Q2 global venture funding went to Anthropic alone, which raised $65 billion in the quarter and passed OpenAI to become the most valuable private company on the Crunchbase Unicorn Board after SpaceX left the list. Axis Intelligence Research calculates Anthropic’s $65 billion as 31.7% of the $205 billion invested globally in Q2 — one company, roughly one venture dollar in three, worldwide.
On the US side, the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor recorded that the top five Q1 deals — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Waymo and Databricks — absorbed $195.6 billion, or 73.2% of the quarter’s $267.2 billion.
The Market Underneath the Megadeals
Axis Intelligence Research applies PitchBook-NVCA’s 87.5% megadeal share to its own $412.7 billion H1 US total:
$412.7B × 0.875 = $361.1B in financings of $100M and above
$412.7B − $361.1B = $51.6B for every other US venture round in the half
That $51.6 billion is the number that matters to the roughly 15,000 US companies a year that raise outside the megadeal tier. It is also the figure that best explains why founders describe a difficult market during a record one.
Venture Capital by Region: Where Did the Money Go?
| Region | H1 2026 funding | Q2 2026 funding | YoY change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| North America | $392B | — | +158% (H1) | Crunchbase |
| Europe | $42B | $24B | +50% (H1) | Crunchbase |
| Asia | — | $42.8B | — | Crunchbase |
| Global | $510B | $205B | — | Crunchbase |
Axis Intelligence Research finds that North America captured 76.9% of global H1 2026 venture funding and Europe 8.2%, a ratio of 9.3 to 1 — computed as $392B ÷ $510B and $42B ÷ $510B on Crunchbase’s own regional totals.
Europe’s own quarter was, on its own terms, the strongest in four years. Crunchbase’s Q2 2026 Europe report records $24 billion raised by Europe-based startups, up 66.7% from the $14.4 billion of Q2 2025, with 65% of that going to 42 companies raising rounds of $100 million or more. Europe’s H1 total of $42 billion still sits below its own 2021 half-year peak of $60 billion.
European Venture Funding by Country, Q2 2026
| Country | Q2 2026 funding | Source |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | $10.4B | Crunchbase |
| Germany | $3.2B | Crunchbase |
| France | $2.4B | Crunchbase |
| Sweden | $2.0B | Crunchbase |
The UK figure came within roughly $400 million of its 2021 peak of $10.8 billion.
European Venture Funding by Stage, Q2 2026
| Stage | Amount | YoY change | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Late-stage | $12.1B | +90% | Crunchbase |
| Early-stage | $8.6B | — | Crunchbase |
| Seed | $3.2B | — | Crunchbase |
Mia Scarlett, Business: European seed came in at $3.2 billion and a single company, Ineffable Intelligence, took a billion of it. Read that the way you would read a segment disclosure: one line carries the growth and the rest of the segment is flat. The number the summary skips is the count — 42 companies hold 65% of the region’s capital, which tells you what the deal flow underneath will look like when those 42 come back to market.
Is Venture Capital Concentration a Policy Problem?
It is now being discussed as one, at the regulator level, on the record.
At the SEC’s 45th Annual Small Business Forum on March 9, 2026, Chairman Paul S. Atkins told attendees that in the first seven months of 2025 roughly 40% of all venture capital dollars flowed to just ten companies, that the share of deals below $5 million fell to a decade low of 49%, and that thirty firms accounted for approximately 75% of total venture dollars raised in 2024. He also noted that 84% of early-stage businesses struggled to secure capital last year.
| Statistic | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Share of VC dollars to ten companies | ~40% | First 7 months of 2025 | SEC (Chairman’s remarks) |
| Share of deals below $5M | 49% (decade low) | 2025 | SEC (Chairman’s remarks) |
| Share of venture dollars raised by 30 firms | ~75% | 2024 | SEC (Chairman’s remarks) |
| Early-stage businesses struggling to secure capital | 84% | 2025 | SEC (Chairman’s remarks) |
The SEC’s Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation delivered the resulting Forum report to Congress on July 27, 2026. The policy vehicle most often named is the INVEST Act, which would raise the qualifying venture capital fund threshold from $10 million and 250 investors to $50 million and 500 investors.
Two independent measurement systems — a commercial dataset and a federal regulator’s own citations — describe the same structure. That agreement is why concentration reads as a market condition rather than a data artefact.
US Venture Capital Fundraising and Fund Formation
The capital going into funds is more concentrated than the capital going into companies.
| Metric | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Share of US capital raised by top three firms | 48.1% | H1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Share of Q1 capital raised by top five firms | 73.1% | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Capital raised across 172 funds | $47.8B | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Capital raised, full year | $66.7B | 2025 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Share of capital raised by experienced firms | 90.9% | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Median US VC fund size | $15.3M | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Median US VC fund size | $25.0M | 2025 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Median time to close a fund | 8 months | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Median time to close a fund | 15 months | 2025 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
The Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor records that six managers — Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Battery Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Lux Capital — together raised $36.4 billion, 76.2% of the quarter’s total. Experienced firms took 90.9% of capital raised, up from 73.7% for full-year 2025 and the highest share in that dataset.
The median fund size falling from $25.0 million to $15.3 million while the median close time drops from 15 months to eight is not a market getting easier. It is a market where the funds that close quickly are the ones that were never going to struggle, and the rest are not closing at all.
Venture Capital Valuations by Stage
| Stage | Median pre-money valuation | Median deal size | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $18.4M | $3.0M | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Series A | $62.0M | $19.6M | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Series B | $203.0M | $40.0M | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Series C | $579.0M | $75.0M | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Series D+ | $2,395.4M | $190.0M | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
For comparison, PitchBook-NVCA records a median Series A pre-money valuation of $21 million in 2020 against $62 million in Q1 2026, and a median Series C pre-money valuation of $167.2 million in 2020 against $579 million.
The average-versus-median gap is the tell. At Series A the Q1 2026 median deal size was $19.6 million against an average of $39.6 million; at Series C, a $75 million median against a $124.6 million average. Half of early-stage deals now exceed $10 million, the highest share of large early-stage rounds in a decade.
AI Versus Non-AI Valuations, Q1 2026
| Stage | AI median pre-money | Non-AI median pre-money | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | $18.7M | $18.0M | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Series A | $78.0M | $42.4M | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Series B | $270.8M | $174.0M | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Series C | $606.5M | $507.3M | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
Median AI valuation step-ups ran 1.9x against 1.6x for non-AI companies, and AI companies raised their next round a median 1.5 years after the last against 1.8 years for non-AI peers.
Mia Scarlett, Business: The seed medians are effectively identical — $18.7 million AI, $18.0 million non-AI. The premium appears at Series A and never closes. That is not conviction at the idea stage; it is repricing once there is something to underwrite. The line the valuation tables leave out is the cadence: a median 1.5 years between rounds against 1.8 for everyone else. Compounded across four rounds, the time advantage is worth more than the multiple.
Venture-Backed Exits and IPOs in 2026
Liquidity returned in Q2, and it returned lumpy.
| Metric | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| SpaceX IPO valuation | $1.77T | Q2 2026 | Crunchbase |
| SpaceX IPO amount raised | $75B | Q2 2026 | Crunchbase |
| SpaceX acquisition of Anysphere (Cursor) | $60B | Q2 2026 | Crunchbase |
| Companies IPO’d above $1B | 32 | Q2 2026 | Crunchbase |
| Companies acquired at $1B+ | 24 | Q2 2026 | Crunchbase |
| Value of $1B+ acquisitions | $113B | Q2 2026 | Crunchbase |
| US VC exit value | $347.3B | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Share of Q1 US exit value from SpaceX–xAI | 72% | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| VC-backed IPOs | 15 | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
| Aggregate unicorn post-money valuation | $5.8T+ | Q1 2026 | PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor |
PitchBook-NVCA reports that a single transaction — SpaceX’s $250 billion acquisition of xAI — accounted for 72% of Q1 US exit value, and that excluding it, the quarter’s underlying exit environment stood at $97.3 billion. It also records that 86.8% of Q1 acquisitions carried undisclosed valuations, and that 44.6% of active unicorns had their first VC round in 2016 or earlier.
The Q1 report notes that the median VC IRR for North American fund vintages since 2019 sits in the single digits, and that the median distributions-to-paid-in multiple for vintages over the past decade remains below 1x.
Methodology
Collection. Every figure in this article was retrieved between August 3 and August 4, 2026 from a document that was fetched and read during production. Sources are the Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor (PDF, as of March 31, 2026), the Q2 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report page and the NVCA summary page (as of June 30, 2026), Crunchbase News global, European and Asian quarterly reports (data as of July 1–6, 2026), and the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Every prose figure has a corresponding row in the accompanying CSV with source organisation, document, URL and retrieval date.
Axis-calculated figures. Five figures in this article are computed by Axis Intelligence Research rather than reported by a source: the $293 billion ex-OpenAI-and-Anthropic H1 total and its 66.6% ratio to 2025; the 76.9% North American and 8.2% European shares of global H1 funding and the 9.3:1 ratio between them; the $361.1 billion megadeal total and $51.6 billion residual; Anthropic’s 31.7% share of Q2 global funding; and the VCCI reading of 66.1. Each shows its inputs and arithmetic inline. All were verified computationally before publication.
Compatibility rule. Crunchbase and PitchBook-NVCA use different inclusion criteria. No figure in this article combines the two datasets. Every ratio is computed with numerator and denominator from the same source.
Excluded. Crunchbase’s Q2 global report states an early-stage figure of “$589 billion,” which is inconsistent with the $205 billion quarterly total and is on its face a typographical error in the source. Axis Intelligence Research excludes it rather than silently correcting it to a value the source does not state. European Q2 AI funding is reported as “more than $10 billion” without a precise figure; it is carried as stated, unrounded, rather than given false precision.
Limitations. Seed-stage data lags materially in both datasets and rises for several quarters after a period closes. Q2 2026 US figures reflect the Venture Monitor’s published summary; stage-level detail in this article is drawn from the Q1 2026 report, which is dated as of March 31, 2026 and labelled accordingly in the CSV.
About This Dataset
Title: Venture Capital Statistics 2026 — Axis Intelligence Research Dataset
Publisher: Axis Intelligence Research
Coverage: Global, North America, Europe, Asia, United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden
Temporal coverage: 2016–2026, with H1 2026 as the primary observation period
Rows: One row per observation, with provenance columns (source_org, source_document, source_url, retrieved_date, is_primary, axis_calculated, method_note)
Licence: CC BY 4.0 — free to reuse, including commercially, with attribution
Mirrors: Hugging Face, Kaggle and GitHub
Update policy: Relevance-driven. This dataset is revised when a new PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor or Crunchbase quarterly report publishes, when the VCCI is recomputed at half-year, or when a source revises a figure already carried here. It is not refreshed on a calendar schedule for its own sake.
Attribution line: Axis Intelligence Research, Venture Capital Statistics 2026, 2026.
Cite This Research
APA Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Venture capital statistics 2026: Record capital, record concentration. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/venture-capital-statistics/
MLA Axis Intelligence Research. “Venture Capital Statistics 2026: Record Capital, Record Concentration.” Axis Intelligence, 4 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/venture-capital-statistics/.
Chicago Axis Intelligence Research. “Venture Capital Statistics 2026: Record Capital, Record Concentration.” Axis Intelligence, August 4, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/venture-capital-statistics/.
To cite the index specifically: Axis Intelligence Research, Venture Capital Concentration Index (VCCI), baseline reading 66.1, as of June 30, 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
If H1 2026 set a record, why does my Series A round feel harder to raise than it did in 2024?
Because the record and your round are in different markets. Of the $412.7 billion deployed in the US in H1, PitchBook-NVCA attributes 87.5% to financings of $100 million or more, which leaves roughly $51.6 billion for everything else. The median Series A pre-money valuation did rise to $62 million, but the median sits well below the $39.6 million average deal size — the distribution has a long right tail that most rounds never touch.
What does a VCCI of 66.1 actually mean for an emerging manager raising a first fund?
It quantifies a market in which the top three US firms took 48.1% of capital raised in H1 and experienced firms took 90.9% of Q1 commitments. First-time fund formation is tracking toward its lowest level since 2016. A reading in the mid-60s means concentration is the dominant structural feature of the LP market, not a temporary distortion, and that differentiation on strategy is now a prerequisite rather than an edge.
Should I trust the $510 billion global figure or the $412.7 billion US figure — they seem to contradict each other?
Neither contradicts the other; they measure different populations with different rules. Crunchbase’s $510 billion is global, across all regions and its own round-type definitions. PitchBook-NVCA’s $412.7 billion covers only US-headquartered companies under a separate methodology that treats debt-and-equity mixes and accelerator investments differently. Use one dataset per calculation and never divide across them.
Has the exit market actually reopened, or is that just SpaceX?
Both, in sequence. Q2 produced 32 IPOs above $1 billion and 24 acquisitions at $1 billion or more totalling $113 billion — the highest acquisition quarter on record per Crunchbase. But in Q1, a single deal accounted for 72% of US exit value, and PitchBook-NVCA notes that 86.8% of Q1 acquisitions had undisclosed valuations, which usually implies markdowns. The pipeline improved; distributions to LPs have not yet arrived.
Why do AI and non-AI seed valuations look almost identical when everything else is so lopsided?
At seed there is rarely enough evidence to price the difference — PitchBook-NVCA puts the Q1 2026 medians at $18.7 million for AI and $18.0 million for non-AI. The premium appears at Series A ($78.0M against $42.4M) and widens from there. What compounds faster than the valuation is the clock: AI companies raise their next round a median 1.5 years out against 1.8 years for non-AI.
Is the regulator doing anything about venture concentration?
The SEC has put it on the record. At the 45th Annual Small Business Forum on March 9, 2026, Chairman Atkins cited the ten-company / 40% figure and the decade-low 49% share of sub-$5 million deals, and the Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation delivered the Forum report to Congress on July 27, 2026. The most concrete legislative vehicle is the INVEST Act’s proposed increase of the qualifying venture capital fund threshold to $50 million and 500 investors.
How much of the global total is Europe actually capturing?
8.2% of H1 2026 global funding, by Axis Intelligence Research’s calculation on Crunchbase totals ($42B ÷ $510B). Europe’s own trajectory is upward — Q2’s $24 billion was its best quarter in four years and 66.7% above Q2 2025 — but its H1 total remains below the $60 billion it recorded in H1 2021, and North America outraised it 9.3 to 1.
When will the VCCI be updated, and can I recompute it myself?
The next reading covers H2 2026 and publishes once both the Q4 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor and Crunchbase’s year-end global report are out. Every input, weight and arithmetic step is disclosed above, so the reading is reproducible from the five source figures without access to any Axis-held data. The dataset is CC BY 4.0.