AI-driven market concentration accelerated in Q1 2026, fueled by some of the largest VC deals and exits on record. While these wins signal momentum for a select group of participants, they also obscure broader uncertainty across the market. A handful of outsized deals does not suggest widespread strength. Rather, it highlights how capital remains concentrated in a narrow set of opportunities.
In this webinar, industry experts from PitchBook, NVCA, J.P. Morgan, Dentons, and EisnerAmper shared insights from the Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA report—from AI’s impact on investment and liquidity to the extreme concentration defining where deals get done and what’s getting funded.
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Key takeaways
- 2026 is already the third-highest year ever for venture investment in the US. Five deals accounted for 73% of the $267 billion of total deal value already reached in Q1, with one representing the highest total invested in any quarter.
- $243 billion of the $267 billion raised to date came from deals of $100 million or more, many within the AI sector.
- Five firms accounted for 73% of the total fundraising for the quarter, driven by LPs putting capital in name-brand, established managers over emerging managers.
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Kyle Stanford is the director of US venture capital research at PitchBook, where he oversees a team of analysts covering the US venture market. He has developed PitchBook’s coverage areas within nontraditional VC investment, venture debt and VC ecosystem development, as well as our breakout of the venture growth stage of the VC market. He also contributes to quarterly core reports, produces thematic analyst notes on various topics and speaks at industry conferences such as SXSW and Collision. He is regularly cited in top-tier publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and Axios, and has been featured in segments on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Yahoo Finance. Prior to this role, he worked on PitchBook’s publishing team, building custom reports across all asset classes and managing the development of analyst core research reports.
Stanford received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Washington and is a CAIA charterholder. He is based in PitchBook’s Seattle office.
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Shiloh Tillemann-Dick serves as the research director at NVCA. His work focuses on the development of qualitative and quantitative analytical products that provide the rest of the team with the material they need to tell NVCA’s story. Before joining NVCA, Shiloh was the political director at the Leadership Now Project, where he developed the organization’s political strategy, oversaw expansion into eight new states, and organized the group’s 2022 candidate program. Shiloh is a graduate of Yale University and has lectured on analytics, public policy, and project management at the University of Maryland.
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Carly Roddy is a Managing Director and co-leads the Global Banking Venture Capital coverage team at J.P. Morgan, responsible for the firm’s support of top venture capital firms, serving as a strategic partner to investors and their portfolio companies. In this role, she delivers the full breadth of the J.P. Morgan platform – helping clients access tailored solutions across every stage of growth. Previously, she served as co-head of Private Capital Markets Americas and has held leadership roles in Equity Capital Markets in New York, San Francisco, Hong Kong and Singapore. Carly joined J.P. Morgan in 2008 and has a B.A. in Economics and French from Princeton University.
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Jeffrey Baumel heads the US securities practice and co-leads the Firm’s Life Sciences and Health Care industry sector, representing a broad range of companies in the life sciences, biotechnology and technology industries. His deep securities law experience comes from working with issuers, underwriters and venture capital investors on a wide range of transactions. These have included public offerings and private placements of equity and debt securities involving hundreds of millions of US dollars. In addition, Jeffrey has worked extensively with venture capital and investment banking firms specializing in growth-stage ventures.
Jeffrey advises boards of directors on complex corporate governance and compliance matters. He also represents both public and private companies in connection with corporate and commercial transactions, including mergers and acquisitions. A chair of the BioNJ Venture Capital Forum, Jeffrey also speaks regularly on issues relating to finance, corporate governance and securities law.
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Ryan is a partner in the firm’s Outsource Accounting Services practice. He has advised and worked with more than 120 early-stage venture capital-seeking and venture-backed companies, several as the interim CFO. Ryan has an extensive financial and management consulting background for more than 20 years with venture backed companies and large technology and management consulting firms including Microsoft, Salomon Smith Barney and PricewaterhouseCoopers.