US venture deal value reaches record $515.8B as exits fail to keep pace

U.S. venture capital just set a new high-water mark: $515.8 billion invested in the first nine months of the year, about 44% above the old annual record, with a quarter still left to run. The headline is AI, and then some. OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC together pulled in more than $200 billion in the first half, and without those rounds PitchBook says the market would look a lot like it has since late 2024.

The third quarter was cooler. Deal value fell about 40% to $98.4 billion, with the sharpest drop in venture-growth rounds. Even so, startups kept signing papers at almost record speed. PitchBook estimates 5,012 deals in the quarter, with only one busier quarter in its books: the start of 2022.

AI still dominates, but not quite as completely as it did earlier in the year. It made up a record 82.7% of venture deal value through September, then slipped to 65.9% in the third quarter. Databricks Inc. led quarterly fundraising with a $5 billion check, which PitchBook called a long way from the giant frontier-lab raises seen earlier this year.

The bigger problem is on the way out. PitchBook’s Nizar Tarhuni said “the real story sits on the exit side,” with the IPO pipeline sliding farther out and sellers leaning harder on mergers and acquisitions just to get deals done. One deal dominated the quarter: Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s $60 billion all-stock purchase of Cursor developer Anysphere Inc., which accounted for 53.1% of third-quarter exit value on its own. Without it, exits would have landed at $53 billion, the weakest level since late 2024.

The rest of the exit market looked thin. Salesforce Inc.’s $3.6 billion purchase of Fin tied with Autodesk Inc.’s acquisition of MaintainX Inc. for the next-largest deal, and PitchBook described the quarter’s listings as “rather mundane.” Healthcare made up 12 of the 18 venture-backed companies to go public, and none was the kind of AI name the market seems to want for liquidity. OpenAI has reportedly ruled out going public this year, while Anthropic has pushed its listing to November. PitchBook now gives Anthropic an 86% chance of an IPO within a year and OpenAI 12%.

All of that leaves a mountain of private value waiting around. The count of billion-dollar startups hit a record 992 at the end of September, with a combined value of $5.7 trillion. And when companies do sell, they’re often taking a haircut: Airtable went to Bending Spoons SpA for $1.3 billion after once being valued at $11.7 billion, while Miro’s expected $1.4 billion sale trails its $17.5 billion Series C mark. On Forge Global, shares in companies that last raised in 2021 trade at a median 59% discount.