Just because VCs are flooding AI favorites with cash doesn’t mean the industry has made a comeback.
That’s what PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association’s newly-released 2025 data on venture capital shows—an uneven market that’s consolidated around a few perceived winners in the most-talked-about sector, AI.
2025 U.S. VC deal value soared to $339.4 billion, not far from 2021 highs of $358.2 billion. And yet: 50% of that 2025 deal value was invested in just 0.05% of the completed deals. And those deals are, of course, the ones you’d expect, from OpenAI’s $40 billion funding round to Databricks’s $4 billion Series L round that valued the company at $134 billion. (Miniscule compared to OpenAI on paper, last valued at $500 billion and reportedly in conversations at valuations as high as $830 billion.)
“If you look beyond AI, dealmaking isn’t hitting new highs,” said Kyle Stanford, PitchBook director of U.S. venture research, via email. “A majority of first-time financings are AI companies too. So venture has made a wholesale change in what is being funded.
Despite deal value nearing the stratospheric heights of 2021, Stanford points out that exit value is just 34% of the 2021 peak.
