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Liquidity for VC remains elusive
US VC dealmaking has never looked stronger on paper. Through Q3 2026, deal value hit $515.8 billion, roughly 44% above 2021’s full-year record, with AI capturing a record 82.7% share. But underneath that headline is a market seizing up on the exit side, reshaping everything else.
SpaceX’s record $1.7 trillion IPO has not reopened the window. Just 18 companies went public in Q3, most of them in healthcare. Active unicorns now total 992, worth a combined $5.7 trillion, with no clear path to liquidity. Some are exiting anyway, at a steep cost—Airtable sold for $1.3 billion and Miro was acquired for $1.4 billion, both at discounts of nearly 90% to their prior valuations.
That liquidity drought is also why fundraising keeps consolidating: LPs starved for distributions are re-upping with the managers who have delivered before. Established firms have commanded 88.2% of all capital raised YTD, the highest share in our dataset, and Andreessen Horowitz alone closed $23.8 billion across multiple funds, which is more than 20% of total US VC fundraising this year.
Record dealmaking, a stalled exit market, and a fundraising landscape consolidating around the few that can still deliver cash back bring the structure of the VC market into focus around a root cause. The Q3 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, presented by J.P. Morgan, Dentons Global Venture Technology Group, and EisnerAmper, breaks down how the market has changed and looks ahead at what to expect for the rest of 2026 and beyond.
Since 2022, the number of actual IPOs has deeply trailed the number expected, leading to a growing backlog of companies that have remained private. This has become a major problem for investors, who have seen the value of many portfolio companies erode with the missed window.
Table of contents
| Market overview | 4 |
| NVCA policy highlights | 8 |
| Dealmaking | 9 |
| A word from J.P. Morgan | 12 |
| Regional spotlight | 14 |
| AI | 15 |
| Female founders | 17 |
| A word from Dentons Global Venture Technology Group | 19 |
| Investor trends | 22 |
| Venture debt | 24 |
| A word from EisnerAmper | 26 |
| Exits | 29 |
| Fundraising | 32 |
| Methodology | 34 |
| References | 35 |