US Venture Deal Value Hits Record $515.8B, Exits Lag

US venture capital has already broken its annual record, and there is still a quarter left. The latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor puts deal value for the first nine months at $515.8 billion, roughly 44% above the previous full-year high. The report comes from data provider PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association, the US industry's trade body. The problem is that exits, which let investors get their money back, are not keeping up.

Two companies, one record

The headline number depends heavily on two names. OpenAI and Anthropic together raised more than $200 billion in the first half alone. PitchBook's analysts said that without those rounds, dollar totals look much like the trend that has held since late 2024.

The third quarter shows how quickly that effect fades. Deal value dropped about 40% to $98.4 billion, and most of the decline came from venture-growth rounds. The number of deals stayed high, though. PitchBook estimates 5,012 deals in the quarter. Only one quarter has been busier, in early 2022.

AI makes up a record 82.7% of deal value for the year. Its share has fallen every quarter since January and reached 65.9% in Q3. The quarter's largest check went to Databricks at $5 billion. The report called that "a far cry" from the triple-digit billions frontier labs raised earlier in the year.

The exit problem

Nizar Tarhuni, PitchBook's executive vice president of research and market intelligence, said "the real story sits on the exit side." In his view, the IPO pipeline keeps getting pushed back, so sellers rely on mergers and acquisitions "to get anything done at all."

One deal carried most of Q3. SpaceX's $60 billion all-stock acquisition of Anysphere, the developer of the Cursor coding tool, accounted for 53.1% of the quarter's exit value. PitchBook ranks it as the second-largest purchase of a venture-backed company on record, behind SpaceX's takeover of xAI earlier this year. Without it, exits total $53 billion, the lowest since late 2024. Next in size were Salesforce's $3.6 billion deal for customer service AI company Fin and Autodesk's purchase of MaintainX, which tied.

PitchBook called the quarter's listings "rather mundane." Healthcare accounted for 12 of the 18 venture-backed IPOs, and none was the kind of AI company Tarhuni said the market needs for liquidity. Through September, 2026 has produced more listings than each of the past three full years. PitchBook called that "a low bar to cross."

The two biggest AI developers are still private. OpenAI has reportedly ruled out an IPO this year. Anthropic has pushed its listing back by a month to November. PitchBook's exit model gives Anthropic an 86% chance of going public within a year and OpenAI a 12% chance.

A long queue and falling prices

A record 992 unicorns, startups valued at $1 billion or more, were waiting in line at the end of September. Together they were worth $5.7 trillion. The 179 new unicorns created this year outnumber the IPOs of every year except 2021.

Companies that do sell often accept far less than their last private valuation. Bending Spoons bought Airtable for $1.3 billion, down from an $11.7 billion valuation. Its purchase of Miro is expected to close in Q4 at $1.4 billion, while Miro's Series C valued it at $17.5 billion. On Forge Global's secondary marketplace, shares of companies that last raised money in 2021 trade at a median 59% discount.

Capital piles into megafunds

US venture firms have raised $108.5 billion across 699 funds this year, almost 39% more than in all of 2025. Megafunds of $500 million or more took 78% of that capital but made up only 6% of new funds. Andreessen Horowitz alone closed $23.8 billion.

Smaller firms are struggling. Only 211 emerging firms have closed a fund this year, compared with 927 in 2022. First-time funds have raised just $4.9 billion across 81 vehicles. Bobby Franklin, the NVCA's president and CEO, said AI's strength "can obscure growing challenges within the fundraising market."

Our Take

The record figure looks like a boom, but it mostly reflects a few very large bets. This suggests the AI funding cycle depends on a small number of labs eventually reaching public markets. That makes Anthropic's November timing a key test. Reports that OpenAI's revenue may be lower than believed add to the uncertainty.

It is worth watching whether other AI firms, such as Lambda with its planned 2027 IPO, find a receptive market. Tarhuni's warning about liquidity in 2027 also suggests that founders without a clear exit path may face harder conversations with investors.