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Venture capital and startup outcomes
Venture capital is money given to young private companies in exchange for a stake, in the hope that a few of them become very large. It's the part of the market most people only see through headlines: a record funding round, a company valued at billions, a fortune made. The numbers underneath those headlines are less exciting and considerably more useful.
This page covers three things. How much US venture money has actually been deployed each year, and the composition of the recent surge, which is not what it looks like from the totals. What venture funds have returned to the people who invested in them, across several horizons, because the horizon you pick changes the story completely. And what a unicorn valuation actually measures, which is not the value of the company. I built it because venture is the corner of finance with the widest gap between what gets repeated and what's been measured. Two of the most quoted statistics in the entire industry, the ones you'll have seen in a dozen decks, could not be traced to any published source at all when I went looking. They might well be true. They aren't verifiable, so they aren't on this page, and the notes explain exactly what I looked for and didn't find.
Everything here is United States only, because the global figures couldn't be obtained on a consistent basis. Four sources, listed at the end with their dates and coverage.
US venture capital deployed $412.7 billion across 9,646 deals in the first half of 2026, of which $355.9 billion, or 86%, went to artificial intelligence. There are 945 active US unicorns worth $5.3 trillion on paper. The fund level record is more sober: Cambridge Associates' US venture index returned 14.86% a year over ten years and 8.10% over twenty five, the latter below its own private equity equivalent. And an academic study of 135 unicorns found reported post money valuations average 50% above fair value, with almost half losing unicorn status once the terms are priced properly.
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Below this point there are 9 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 4 named sources, roughly 2050 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
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