Global venture funding hit $212.9B in Q2 2026, the second-highest quarter on record. Read on its own, that’s a strong market signal. It isn’t the full picture. CB Insights’ own Q2 2026 State of Venture report shows deal count falling to 7,086, an 11% drop from the prior quarter and the lowest quarterly deal count in a decade.

Record funding and the fewest deals in ten years, in the same quarter. That gap is the actual story, and it matters for how capital gets placed right now.

Where the funding is actually going

Mega-rounds, deals of $100M or more, made up 81% of all funding this quarter. Anthropic alone raised three separate rounds, $50.0B, $10.0B, and $5.0B, together accounting for more than a third of all mega-round dollars invested globally this quarter. A small number of frontier AI labs are absorbing enough capital to keep the headline funding number near record highs, while the number of companies actually getting funded keeps shrinking.

Exits moved the same direction. M&A activity fell 10% quarter over quarter, IPOs fell 6%. SpaceX’s IPO, the largest on record at a $1.78T valuation, is real and notable. It’s also one company, in a quarter where total exit activity has now declined for two consecutive quarters.

Every major country’s deal count fell too, most by double digits. The United States was down 31%, China 26%, the UK 29%, India 37%, Canada 25%, down to 113 deals. North America still captured 68% of global funding this quarter, but that’s 68% of a shrinking number of actual deals, not evidence of underlying strength.

What this means for capital looking for a home

If a fund’s edge is access to the next mega-round, this is a hard market to compete in, that pool of capital is chasing a small number of increasingly concentrated deals, and the data shows that concentration deepening each quarter, not easing.

There’s a different way to be positioned. Median deal size actually rose 5% this quarter, to $4.2M, even as the number of deals fell. That’s a market rewarding selection discipline over access to the largest round in the room, and it’s where a structured, direct-pipeline model does its work.

At GSA Ventures, that discipline isn’t something we’re building toward, it’s the model. We invest exclusively in companies that have already been through Global’s own programs, so the diligence work happens well before a term sheet exists, not after one. In a quarter where deal count hit a decade low and a single company absorbed more than a third of all mega-round funding globally, that’s a genuinely different way to be exposed to this market, not a smaller version of the same one.

If that’s a thesis worth discussing for your own portfolio, we’d welcome the conversation.

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Source: CB Insights, State of Venture, Global, Q2 2026.