Two venture peaks look alike only from far away

The record

The Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, published 15 April 2026, reports $267.2 billion in US venture deal value for the quarter, a figure it says exceeded every full-year total except those of 2021 and 2025, alongside $347.3 billion in exit value, the highest quarter PitchBook has recorded. The same report states that without the five largest deals and exits, those two figures fall by 73.2% and 86.6% respectively. CB Insights' State of Venture 2024 Report, published 7 January 2025, records that mega-rounds of $100 million or more made up 60% of Q4 2024's global funding, nearly tying Q1 2021's 61% for the highest share ever across venture, while quarterly deal volume fell below 6,000 for the first time since 2016.

What the sources establish

Both providers document concentration, not just size. PitchBook's own arithmetic shows that Q1 2026's headline totals depend overwhelmingly on a handful of deals and exits; strip them out and the quarter looks ordinary. CB Insights' figure shows that 2021's mega-round share and 2024's were nearly identical by that one measure, even though the two periods are usually described as opposite market moods. Carta's State of Private Markets: Q1 2026, published 29 May 2026, adds a third data point from a different population: more than 60% of the venture capital raised by companies on the Carta platform in the quarter went to AI companies, and the share of down rounds it tracks fell from a 2023 peak of 22% to below 12%. Three providers, three different underlying populations, all describing the same broad pattern of dollars concentrating in fewer, larger, AI-linked deals.

Scope and revision

The comparison holds for concentration, measured consistently within each provider's own series: PitchBook's largest-deal share, CB Insights' mega-round share, and Carta's down-round share each show a specific, named metric moving in a specific direction. The comparison does not hold for a blended 2021-versus-2026 dollar total, because PitchBook's $267.2 billion is a quarter, CB Insights' 61% is a share from a different quarter three years earlier, and Carta's figures cover only companies on its own platform. Stacking these into one before-and-after headline would compare different periods, different scopes and, in Carta's case, a different sampled population, under one arrow.

The decision in front of you

Treat 2021-versus-2026 as a set of named, provider-specific comparisons rather than one story. This is an editorial method, not a finding about which year was larger.

• Is the comparison being drawn on the same metric, from the same provider, across both periods?
• Does removing the largest few deals change the direction of the comparison, as PitchBook's own figures show it can?
• Do the 2026 source and the 2021 source cover the same population, or has the underlying sample changed?

The two peaks share a concentration pattern that the providers themselves document. They do not share a single number that can stand in for both.