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US venture deal value hits record $515.8B as AI mega-rounds outpace exits

US venture deal value reached a record $515.8 billion in the first nine months of 2026, lifted by OpenAI and Anthropic mega-rounds, while exits lagged far behind, PitchBook-NVCA data show.

AI News Feed · 2026-10-08 14:28

Much of that total went to OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC, which together raised more than $200 billion in the first half of the year. PitchBook's analysts said that without those rounds, dollar totals have held to much the same trend since late 2024.

Third-quarter deal value fell about 40%, to $98.4 billion, with most of the decline coming out of venture-growth rounds. Startups kept closing deals at a near-record pace regardless: PitchBook counts an estimated 5,012 in the quarter, a level matched only once before, in the first quarter of 2022.

AI accounted for a record 82.7% of the year's deal value, although its share of each quarter has been shrinking since January and fell to 65.9% in the third. Databricks Inc. took the quarter's largest check at $5 billion, which the report described as a far cry from the triple-digit billions frontier labs raised earlier in the year.

PitchBook's larger concern is how that money returns to investors. Nizar Tarhuni, executive vice president of research and market intelligence at PitchBook, said the real story sits on the exit side. In his view the initial public offering pipeline keeps slipping further out, leaving sellers to lean on mergers and acquisitions to get anything done at all.

One transaction carried the quarter's exit numbers. Space Exploration Technologies Corp.'s $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor developer Anysphere Inc. accounted for 53.1% of third-quarter exit value on its own. PitchBook ranks it as the second-largest acquisition of a venture-backed company on record, behind SpaceX's takeover of xAI Inc. earlier this year. Strip it out and the quarter's exits come to $53 billion, the lowest since late 2024. Salesforce Inc.'s $3.6 billion deal for customer service AI company Fin tied with Autodesk Inc.'s purchase of MaintainX Inc. as the next largest.

PitchBook described the quarter's listings as rather mundane. Healthcare accounted for 12 of the 18 venture-backed companies that went public, and none was an AI company of the sort Tarhuni said the market needs for liquidity. Each of the past three years produced fewer new listings in total than 2026 has managed through September, which PitchBook called a low bar to cross.

Neither of the two biggest AI developers has listed yet. OpenAI has reportedly ruled out going public this year, and Anthropic has pushed its offering back by a month to November. PitchBook's exit model gives Anthropic an 86% chance of an IPO within a year. OpenAI's odds are 12%.

That leaves a long line of private companies waiting their turn. The count of startups valued at $1 billion or more hit a record 992 at the end of September, with a combined value of $5.7 trillion. The 179 new unicorns created this year outnumber the IPOs of any year but 2021.

Companies that do sell are often taking far less than their last private price. Bending Spoons SpA bought Airtable Inc. for $1.3 billion, down from an $11.7 billion valuation, and its purchase of workplace collaboration platform Miro is expected to close in the fourth quarter at $1.4 billion. Miro had raised its Series C at a $17.5 billion valuation. On Forge Global Holdings Inc.'s secondary marketplace, shares in companies that last raised money in 2021 trade at a median 59% discount, the report said.

On the fundraising side, U.S. venture firms have raised $108.5 billion across 699 funds so far this year, topping 2025's full-year haul by almost 39%. Megafunds of $500 million or more took 78% of that capital while making up just 6% of new funds. Andreessen Horowitz alone closed funds worth $23.8 billion.

At the other end of the market, just 211 emerging firms have closed a fund this year, compared with 927 in 2022, and first-time funds have raised only $4.9 billion across 81 vehicles. Bobby Franklin, president and chief executive of the National Venture Capital Association, said the strength of AI innovation can obscure growing challenges within the fundraising market. Firms like these, along with midsize managers, are often among the first to spot new entrepreneurs and technologies, he said, and the country's innovation lead depends on keeping a broad and competitive investor base.

Tarhuni said this year's numbers will look like a boom at the top line, but that for most of the market the liquidity will not show up, which he said will have a large impact going into 2027.