The NVCA Yearbook names PitchBook as its sole data provider

The record

The National Venture Capital Association and PitchBook jointly publish two distinct annual and quarterly products, and it is easy to conflate them. The Yearbook page states that the 2024 edition, the 27th in the series, documents venture activity from the past year, covering full-year 2023 U.S. activity, and closes with a single line of attribution to "NVCA's official data provider, PitchBook." The most recent edition, the 2026 Yearbook, reports on 2025 activity through 31 December 2025: 2,984 U.S. VC firms closing 15,352 deals worth $320 billion, $67 billion raised across venture funds -- the lowest total in nine years -- and 859 active unicorns valued at a combined $4.34 trillion. PitchBook, a Morningstar company, is again named as the data provider behind every figure.

What the sources establish

Both editions establish the same publishing arrangement: NVCA sets the framing and narrative, PitchBook supplies the underlying deal, fund and firm counts. Neither page describes an independent classification scheme; the Yearbook appears to inherit PitchBook's own taxonomy for stage, sector and geography rather than defining separate rules. That matters because NVCA and PitchBook also produce the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, described on its own page as "the authoritative quarterly report" on venture activity -- a different cadence and a different publication from the annual Yearbook, even though both carry the same two names. A reader who assumes the Yearbook's annual total is simply four Venture Monitor quarters added together is assuming a continuity that neither page actually asserts.

Scope and revision

The Yearbook is a once-a-year snapshot of a full calendar year, prepared and released months after that year closes; the Venture Monitor updates quarterly and is revised with each new release as more deals are reported late. The two therefore reflect different vintages of the same underlying PitchBook database at any given moment, and a Yearbook total for a given year is not guaranteed to match a Venture Monitor total for the same four quarters pulled earlier, before late-reported deals were folded in. Neither page discloses an as-of data-pull date, so the exact cutoff behind either total is not stated.

The decision in front of you

Editorially: if you are quoting a full-year U.S. venture figure, cite the Yearbook edition and its stated coverage year rather than a sum of quarterly Venture Monitor releases, and note that PitchBook is the sole named source behind both products. If a number needs to reconcile against another provider's annual total, treat any mismatch as a methodology question first, not an error.

• Which edition year of the Yearbook does this figure come from, and does it match the year actually being discussed?
• Is a full-year total being compared with a sum of quarterly Venture Monitor releases rather than the Yearbook's own published figure?
• Has PitchBook's underlying data for that period been revised since the cited Yearbook edition was published?

The Yearbook and the Venture Monitor share a publisher and a data provider, but not a cadence, a revision schedule, or necessarily a data-pull date -- three differences worth checking before treating either one as a stand-in for the other.