VC Report: AI Drives 10x Late-Stage Value Velocity as Mega-Rounds Take 87.5% of Capital

For founders building outside the artificial intelligence ecosystem, the math of raising capital has fundamentally changed. The venture market has effectively become a single trade, concentrating unprecedented wealth into a handful of late-stage infrastructure and model providers while leaving the broader startup economy to compete for a shrinking pool of traditional funding. This structural shift was quantified on Monday when PitchBook released its Q2 US VC Valuations report, revealing the sheer scale of the market's top-heavy nature.[1]

The headline figure from the report illustrates a market that has abandoned breadth in favor of massive, concentrated bets. Megadeals—defined as financing rounds of $100 million or more—absorbed a staggering 87.5% of all venture dollars deployed in the first half of 2026. To put that into perspective, smaller financings accounted for just 12.5% of total deal value, meaning the vast majority of startups are fighting over a fraction of the available capital.[1][5]

Overall, US venture capital deployed $412.7 billion in the first half of the year, nearly 30% more than the entirety of 2025. Of that total, $355.9 billion—or roughly 86% of every dollar—went directly to AI companies. This concentration is not just a tilt; it represents a fundamental rewiring of venture capital, where investor appetite is almost exclusively focused on a limited set of high-conviction opportunities in the AI sector.[2][3][4]

The most striking metric in the PitchBook report is the "velocity of value creation" at Series D and beyond. In 2025, the median value creation at this late stage was $108.9 million. This year, it reached $1.028 billion—a nearly tenfold increase in just twelve months. This unprecedented acceleration is being driven almost entirely by top AI companies, whose valuations are compounding at rates that break traditional venture heuristics.[1][4]

Anthropic serves as the primary mechanical driver behind these figures. The company's valuation grew 5.3x in just eight months, culminating in a $65 billion Series H financing round that pushed its post-money valuation to $965 billion. Together, OpenAI and Anthropic captured 43% of all global startup funding in the first half of the year, making the venture landscape effectively a two-company market at the very top.[1][2]

The AI premium is stark across all stages of development, showing up in two distinct measures. AI companies posted a median valuation step-up of 2.2x this year, compared to 1.6x for non-AI startups. Separately, AI pre-money valuations are running roughly double those of non-AI companies at Series A. By Series D and later, that comparison reaches an astonishing 6.6x, with the median AI pre-money valuation at that stage now sitting at $3.95 billion.[1]

This concentration of capital is having profound effects on the secondary market, where buyers are increasingly pricing the vintage of the investment rather than the underlying business. On the secondary platform Forge, companies whose last primary round was in 2026 are currently trading at no discount at all. For 2025 vintages, the median discount is a modest 4.7%.[1]

However, for startups that have not raised capital recently, the secondary market is unforgiving. Companies that last raised in 2021 are trading at a massive median discount of 59.1%, while 2022 vintages face a 54.1% discount. Stale primary rounds lack a fresh reference point, and without a recent price set by a lead investor, secondary buyers are heavily discounting these assets, regardless of their current revenue metrics.[1]

Despite the massive concentration at the top, the mid-market has not disappeared entirely, though its share of dollars has been cut roughly in half over the past year. Early-stage investment actually hit its highest level in more than three years in Q2, totaling just over $31 billion in North America. However, even this early-stage growth was heavily boosted by AI, including a single $12 billion financing for physical AI startup Prometheus that contributed more than 40% of the quarterly total.[2][3]

The exit market mirrors this pattern of extreme concentration. SpaceX's IPO in the second quarter, which raised $75 billion at a $1.7 trillion valuation, generated more value than every US venture-backed exit of the past decade combined. Cerebras Systems also completed a massive $34.3 billion IPO, while Anthropic and OpenAI have both filed confidentially to go public, setting the stage for potential trillion-dollar exits.[2][3][6]

Yet, the public markets are showing some skepticism toward these astronomical valuations. Of the ten most notable listings since 2025, only three currently trade above their IPO price, with several down more than 50%. This dynamic suggests that while venture capitalists are willing to underwrite massive late-stage rounds, public market investors remain cautious about absorbing these valuations once the companies transition out of the private ecosystem.[1]