PitchBook: US venture funding hits $412.7B in first half as AI deals dominate

U.S. venture capital deal value hit $412.7 billion in the first half of 2026, nearly 30% more than investors put to work in all of last year — and a small cluster of giant artificial intelligence rounds accounted for almost the entire jump.

That’s according to the second-quarter PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report released Wednesday night. Artificial intelligence companies took $355.9 billion of the total, some 86% of every venture dollar spent in the six months. PitchBook casts the shift as structural rather than cyclical, as AI coding tools lower the cost to build software and foundation models give founders a base layer to work from without training their own systems.

The money continues to pool at the top. Rounds of $100 million or more accounted for 87.5% of everything deployed in the half. Deals below that mark, which still make up the bulk of the market by count, drew $51.4 billion among them. Their slice of total value keeps sliding. It was 43.8% in 2024 and 33.1% last year. This year it’s 12.5%.

Seven rounds of $1 billion or more closed in the second quarter, from Anthropic PBC, Prometheus Inc., Anduril Industries Inc., Baseten Labs Inc., MiRus LLC, Kalshi Inc. and Cognition AI Inc., together worth $87.2 billion. Five went to AI companies.

The biggest was Anthropic’s $65 billion round, which lifted its post-money valuation to $965 billion and moved it ahead of OpenAI Group PBC. The step-up was steep. Anthropic had raised at a $350 billion pre-money valuation just three months earlier and this round marked it at $900 billion, up 157%. The headline figure was softer than it looked. About $15 billion had been committed in earlier pledges, so less new money actually went in than the $65 billion implied.

Exit activity set records, but rested almost entirely on one name. Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s $1.7 trillion initial public offering in the second quarter generated more value than every U.S. venture-backed exit of the past decade combined, raised $75 billion and pushed the company’s market capitalization above $2 trillion in early trading. PitchBook called SpaceX’s offering the largest IPO of all time and the largest U.S. venture-backed tech listing by a factor of 17.

Two other SpaceX deals padded the tally: its $250 billion acquisition of xAI Inc. in the first quarter, the largest purchase of a venture-backed company on record, and a pending $60 billion all-stock deal for coding startup Cursor. Strip out SpaceX and quarterly exit value would sit close to the constrained levels of recent years.

Beyond that, listings were scarce. Cerebras Systems Inc. completed a $34.3 billion IPO after canceling a 2025 attempt, but its shares opened at more than double the offer price before sliding back below it. Of the 10 largest U.S. tech IPOs excluding SpaceX and Cerebras, only three traded higher a year after listing. Anthropic and OpenAI have both filed confidentially to go public, deals PitchBook expects to produce two more trillion-dollar exits.

Fundraising carried the same fingerprint. Venture firms pulled in $72.4 billion across just 405 funds, almost matching the $74.9 billion they raised in all of 2025 from far more vehicles. Funds of $1 billion or more took $49.5 billion of it. Three names did most of the gathering. Andreessen Horowitz closed seven funds worth $14.2 billion, Thrive Capital raised $10 billion across two funds and Founders Fund $10.6 billion across two. Among them, that came to $34.8 billion, or 48% of every fundraising dollar in the half.

The same pattern showed up everywhere else. Corporate venture arms took part in 21% of deals, their smallest share in 10 years, as parent companies hoarded cash to cover their own climbing AI bills. Lending told a matching story. Venture debt reached $64.7 billion but was spread across just 280 loans and one $20 billion refinancing for SpaceX did much of the work.

PitchBook’s analysts cautioned that a market this dependent on a single theme faces a broad correction if AI growth or returns disappoint. Venture’s power law compounds the risk, they wrote, because even if AI delivers, the returns will concentrate in a few winners, leaving a wide field of companies that raised at elevated prices exposed.

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