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.
