Venture funds raised far less after the 2022 peak

The record

US venture funds raised $222.71 billion from limited partners in 2022, the peak year in the National Venture Capital Association's own 2026 Yearbook data pack, produced with PitchBook data as of 31 December 2025. The same table records $107.43 billion raised in 2023, $101.88 billion in 2024, and $67.00 billion in 2025, the lowest annual total in nine years. NVCA's own Yearbook landing page, published 9 April 2026, states the 2025 figure directly: '$67B VC fundraising — lowest in 9 years.' The number of US venture funds closed fell over the same span, from 1,782 in 2022 to 1,019 in 2024 and 585 in 2025.

What the sources establish

This is capital raised by venture funds from their own limited partners, commitments into a fund's account, not capital those funds later invest into startups; the yearbook tracks both series separately, and this trace concerns only the fundraising side. The decline was not a single-year event: fund count and dollars raised both fell for three consecutive years after 2022, from 1,782 funds and $222.71 billion to 585 funds and $67.00 billion by 2025, a fall of roughly 70% in both count and dollars. The dollar decline outpaced the fund-count decline earliest, from 2022 to 2023, before the two measures moved together; the yearbook's own average-fund-size series suggests part of the reason, since fewer very large funds closed in 2023 than in 2022, pulling the total down faster than the count.

Scope and revision

The figures describe funds PitchBook classifies as US venture capital, by the year each fund held its final close, as its data stood on 31 December 2025. A fund whose final close has not yet been reported will not appear in the year it is eventually recorded against, and NVCA and PitchBook's own methodology notes elsewhere in the same document flag that fundraising totals can shift as later closings are reconciled. The series says nothing about why limited partners committed less; it counts outcomes, not intentions, and says nothing about whether funds that did close were larger or smaller than general partners originally targeted.

The decision in front of you

Editorially: a founder assessing how many well-capitalized funds are likely to be actively deploying over the next one to two years can read this series as a leading indicator of deal supply, with a lag; a fund closed in 2025 typically deploys over several years, so a smaller 2023-2025 vintage class implies fewer total dollars from those vintages specifically, not from the whole market, since older, larger funds may still be investing.

• Is a given fund part of this cycle's smaller 2023-2025 vintage class, or an older, larger vintage still deploying capital?
• Does a cited figure describe capital raised by funds, or capital invested into companies, two different series in the same dataset?
• Has a given year's figure been finalized, or could later-reported fund closings still revise it upward?

Three straight years of decline in both fund count and dollars raised is a clearer signal than any single year alone, and NVCA's own data shows both measures, not just one, moving together.