Why the VC 'record funding' headlines are misleading.

$510 billion.

That's the global venture capital total for the first half of 2026, per Crunchbase. It's a record that has already surpassed the total for all of 2025. The headlines called it a boom.

We all know headlines don’t tell the full story. Two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, accounted for $217 billion of that number. That's 43% of all global startup funding in six months, captured by two organizations.

Ok... so let’s remove those two and see what the investment landscape actually looks like without them. It remains extraordinarily concentrated, to a degree we’ve never seen before:

Megadeals of $100 million or more captured 87.5% of US venture dollars deployed in H1.

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