It’s an AI world and we’re all just living in it.
PitchBook released its Q2 2026 U.S. VC Valuations data this week, and the report aligns with the skewed venture market we’ve come to know: Investors are willing to pay up for a few anointed AI companies, and (almost) everything else is a pass or rounding error. For the first half of this year, AI megadeals were where 87.5% of all U.S. venture dollars went.
There are valuation step-ups outside AI—it’s just that the AI premium is undeniable. PitchBook says that non-AI companies at the median saw valuation step-ups of 1.6x, whereas for AI that was 2.2x. It’s Series D and later where the gulf gets vast, where for AI that number has become 6.6x.
“The Series D+ step-up is clear evidence of how much AI is driving venture valuations,” said Emily Zheng, PitchBook senior research analyst, via email. “Median velocity of value creation at that stage jumped from $108.9 million in 2025 to over $1 billion in 2026, nearly a 10x increase. Top AI companies like Anthropic are driving this growth, as its valuation grew 5.3x in just eight months. Venture returns already follow a power law, and AI has raised the bar for what an outsized valuation looks like.”
In this market, liquidity remains hard to find. Though there’s an IPO window of sorts, it’s hardly persuasive, with only SpaceX and Cerebras offering much evidence going public could be worth the trouble.
Acquisitions, on the face of it, have some promise: 2026 acquisition value so far has reached $375.4 billion, a decade high with valuations up to 1.9x from last year’s 1.2x, according to PitchBook. But breaking it down by deal, it’s clear that results are varied: ServiceNow’s Armis buyout was $7.8 billion, a jump from the cybersecurity company’s prior $6.1 billion valuation. Elsewhere, Capital One’s $5.2 billion Brex deal marked a serious haircut from the fintech unicorn’s peak $12.3 billion valuation.
The secondaries market is a useful mirror here: If the company is new and AI, you’re in demand. If the company is neither of those things, you have a problem. PitchBook notes that, on secondary trading platform Forge, startups that have raised this year or last were trading at a median discount of zero to 5%. Now, for startups that last raised in 2021 or 2022, that number transforms into a median of 54% and 59%.
“The winners are bigger than ever, overshadowing the rest of the venture market,” said PitchBook’s Zheng over email. “Companies that cannot raise on strong terms right now generally are not raising at all.”
To be clear, I’m not saying that those startups last backed in 2021 are uniformly great companies getting left behind—that era certainly had its share of irrational exuberance (remember NFTs?). I do think there are some solid companies dusted for being off-trend. Though what’s perhaps most interesting is the rate of change it reflects: Yes, data for the AI-addled venture market has looked roughly the same for a while.
But the world has very much turned over.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle X: @agarfinks Email: [email protected]
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.
Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
The post 87.5% of venture dollars went to AI. The rest fought over scraps appeared first on Fortune.
