Startups hoping to raise a nine-figure round in the future would best dampen their ambition; venture capital events worth $100 million or more are rapidly dying out.
A few years ago, nine-figure venture financing events were common. So much so that during my Crunchbase News days they started calling “supergiant” rounds to avoid having to spell their size. Damn, us actually reported regularly of rounds worth a few hundred million or more until sheer volume made it impractical. Good times.
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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 the $100 million bubble took much longer to deflate than I expected, if trends continue, nine-digit venture capital events will once again become rare enough to merit our attention.
The fall of the $100 million round of fame is an Icarian saga. PitchBook data collected by businesskinda.com this morning tells a simple story: From a steady base of about 75 such funding events per quarter through 2019 and much of 2020, the rate at which venture investors pumped capital into startups exploded in nine-figure chunks in 2021 , only to crash to previous levels in about the same amount of time it took to reach its peak.
The data is grim: From 75 financing events of $100 million or more in the first quarter of 2019 to 426 in the fourth quarter of 2021, the rate of nine-figure venture deals has slowed to just 57 so far in the first quarter of 2023 .
Sure, we’ll see the current quarterly count tick higher in the coming weeks, but it’s definitely going to close the first quarter below the 157 we saw in the fourth quarter of 2022.
Here’s the mega-round deal volume chart from early 2019 to today:
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