According to the quarterly PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report released today, gigantic artificial intelligence rounds have pushed the value of U.S. venture capital deals about 44% above the previous annual record with a quarter to go, but the exits necessary to return that money to investors have not kept pace.
Much of the $515.8 billion invested in the first nine months of the year went to OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC, which together took in more than $200 billion in the first half of the year. Without these rounds, analysts at PitchBook said dollar amounts would have largely maintained the same trend since the end of 2024.
Deal value fell about 40% to $98.4 billion in the third quarter, with most of the decline coming from venture growth rounds. Regardless, startups continued to close deals at a near record pace. PitchBook counts an estimated 5,012 people this quarter, and its records only show a busier quarter at the start of 2022.
AI accounts for a record 82.7% of business value for the year, although its share has shrunk in every quarter since January, falling to 65.9% in the third. Databricks Inc. picked up the largest check of the quarter for $5 billion. That’s a “far cry” from the three-digit billions Frontier Labs raised earlier this year, the report said.
PitchBook’s bigger concern is how the money will come out. Nizar Tarhuni, executive vice president of research and market intelligence at PitchBook, said: “The real story is on the exit side.” He believes the IPO pipeline is falling behind, forcing sellers to rely on mergers and acquisitions “to get anything done.”
A transaction contained the exit numbers for the quarter. Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s all-stock purchase of cursor developer Anysphere Inc. worth $60 billion accounted for 53.1% of the exit value in the third quarter alone. According to PitchBook, this is the second-largest acquisition of a venture capital firm on record, following SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI Inc. earlier this year.
Stripping it out puts the quarter’s departures at $53 billion, which would be the lowest since the end of 2024. Salesforce Inc.’s $3.6 billion deal for customer service AI company Fin is the second-largest deal, tied with Autodesk Inc.’s purchase of MaintainX Inc.
PitchBook described the neighborhood’s listings as “pretty mundane.” Twelve of the 18 venture capital-backed companies that went public were in healthcare, and none were AI companies of the type Tarhuni said the market needed liquidity. Each of the last three years produced fewer new entries overall than 2026 managed through September. PitchBook called this “a low bar to exceed.”
Neither of the two largest AI developers is listed yet. OpenAI has reportedly ruled out an IPO this year and Anthropic has delayed its offering by a month to November. PitchBook’s exit model gives Anthropic an 86 percent chance of going public within a year. OpenAI’s chances are 12%.
That leaves a long line of private companies waiting their turn. The number of startups valued at $1 billion or more reached a record 992 at the end of September, with a total value of $5.7 trillion. The 179 new unicorns minted this year surpass the IPOs of any other year except 2021.
Companies that sell often take 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 increased its Series C funding to $17.5 billion. On Forge Global Holdings Inc.’s secondary market, shares of companies that last raised money in 2021 are trading at an average discount of 59%, the report said.
On the fundraising side, U.S. venture capitalists have raised $108.5 billion across 699 funds so far this year, surpassing full-year 2025 revenue by nearly 39%. Megafunds of $500 million or more claimed 78% of this capital, while accounting for just 6% of new funding. Andreessen Horowitz alone closed funds worth $23.8 billion.
At the other end of the market, just 211 emerging companies have closed a fund this year, compared to 927 in 2022, and first-time funds have raised just $4.9 billion across 81 vehicles. Bobby Franklin, president and chief executive of the National Venture Capital Association, said the power of AI innovation “may obscure growing challenges in the fundraising market.” Companies like these, along with mid-sized managers, were often among the first to discover new entrepreneurs and technologies, he said, and the country’s innovation edge depends on retaining “a broad and competitive investor base.”
“This year’s numbers will look like a sales boom,” Tarhuni said. “But liquidity will not be there for the majority of the market and that will have a big impact until 2027.”
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
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