US startup exits totaled $67.7 billion across 394 deals in Q2, up from 330 transactions for a cumulative $52.4 billion in Q1, according to the latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.
While IPOs are picking up some steam, investors say M&A is the main driver as tariff uncertainty keeps clouding public listings. Through the first half of this year, acquisitions made up a 35.3% share of total US exit deal count, landing 31% of overall exit deal value.
And despite big-ticket outliers, like Alphabet’s record $32 billion deal to purchase Wiz and OpenAI’s $6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive’s startup, the bulk have been of nascent and fast-growing startups.
Unicorns are still commanding high valuations, making later-stage M&A pricier and slowing down those deals. There are now a record 841 unicorns in the US, with 46 new entrants in the first half of this year.
Acquisitions of pre-seed, seed and early-stage startups in H1 accounted for a combined 63.7% of all acquisitions. And the trend is expected to stick around, according to data from the report.
Privately held heavyweights are likely to keep strategically purchasing early-stage startups, according to New Form Capital investment partner Matt Cooper. Smaller acquisitions don’t face as much M&A scrutiny as large deals for unicorns, he said, adding that the FTC under President Donald Trump “hasn’t necessarily shaken things up as much as venture initially hoped.”
Investors had been hopeful that new FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson would take a lighter touch on enforcing antitrust, compared to former FTC head Lina Khan, who sued Alphabet, Amazon and Meta on alleged monopoly grounds.
Meanwhile, 2025 has already seen a couple of new AI “acqui-hire” deals by big tech companies for eye-popping sums, in part to eschew regulatory scrutiny.
Still, IPOs at lower valuations than a company’s last private pricing continue, alongside a similar trend in venture financings, according to Emily Zheng, a senior VC analyst at PitchBook.
“The reality is that valuations from the pandemic era, for a lot of companies, are not accurate anymore to their business fundamentals,” Zheng said.
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