US Venture Hits $412.7B in H1 2026, AI Takes 86%

The headline number from the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor is that US venture capital deployed $412.7 billion in the first half of 2026, nearly 30% more than the entirety of 2025. The more interesting number is the one underneath it: $355.9 billion, or 86% of every dollar, went to AI companies. That is not a tilt, that is a market that has effectively become a single trade.

The concentration shows up again inside Q2. Seven rounds above $1 billion closed in the quarter, totaling $87.2 billion, and five of them were AI companies. Anthropic's $65 billion round was the largest, taking its post-money valuation to $965 billion, up from a $350 billion pre-money mark just three months earlier per the report. Rounds of $100 million and above now account for 87.5% of all capital deployed, compared with 43.8% in 2024 and 33.1% in 2025. The mid-market has not disappeared exactly, but its share of dollars has been cut roughly in half in a year.

Exits are following the same pattern of very large or very little. SpaceX's IPO in Q2, at a $1.7 trillion valuation raising $75 billion, generated more value than every US venture-backed exit of the past decade combined, according to PitchBook. Cerebras Systems went public with a $34.3 billion IPO where shares reportedly opened at more than double the offer price. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have filed confidentially to go public, and PitchBook expects them to produce two more trillion-dollar exits.

The honest caveat is one the PitchBook analysts wrote themselves: "a market this dependent on a single theme faces a broad correction if AI growth or returns disappoint." What the report doesn't give you is the split of that $355.9 billion between model labs, infrastructure, and applications, or a picture of who is actually funding these mega-rounds beyond the three firms (Andreessen Horowitz at $14.2 billion, Founders Fund at $10.6 billion, Thrive Capital at $10 billion) that took nearly half of H1 fundraising.

For a founder or an LP, the practical read is that the deployment power for the next vintage is concentrating in a few funds that are almost all pointed at the same category. If you are outside AI, venture debt (at $64.7 billion across 280 loans) may matter more to your runway math than the top-line euphoria suggests.