Startups hoping to get a nine-figure round in the future had best tame their ambitions; Venture funding events of $100 million or more are quickly disappearing.
A few years ago, nine-figure hedge funds were common.
So much so that during my Crunchbase News days we started calling them “supergiant” wheels to avoid having to specify their size.
Heck, we actually used to regularly report on bikes worth several hundred million or more until the sheer volume made it impractical. Good times.
Now more than a year after the peak of the venture boom in 2021, it is clear that those days are behind us.
And while it took a lot longer than I expected to blow the $100M round bubble.
If trends continue, nine-figure venture funding events will once again become rare enough to warrant our attention.
The $100 million wheel fall from stardom is an Icarian saga. PitchBook data collected by TechCrunch this morning tells a simple story: From a steady base of about 75 such funding events per quarter through 2019 and most of 2020, the pace at which venture capitalists pumped capital into startups in nine-figure chunks by 2021 exploded. they just collapsed back to previous levels in about the same time it took to peak. The data is stark: from 75 funding deals of $100 million or more in Q1 2019 to 426 in Q4 2021, a pace of nine In the first quarter of 2023, the number of venture deals dropped to just 57.
Naturally, we’ll see the current quarterly figure go higher in the coming weeks, but it will certainly close Q1 below the 157 we saw in Q4 2022.
Here’s a graph of the volume of mega-round deals from the beginning of 2019 to today:
Sources: Techcrunch | Televisor.co.uk