As mega-funds grab 72% of all capital raised, the gap between VC’s haves and have-nots keeps widening

Venture capital’s gotten lopsided. While you probably knew some version of this—I know I certainly talk about it enough—the data is nevertheless striking. Pitch Book this week released its U.S. VC midyear outlook, and the fundraising numbers are skewed to say the least: Funds over $1 billion raked in almost 72% of all capital raised in 2026 so far. First-time managers, meanwhile, comprised under 10%. Over time, this asymmetry will stick or worsen, said Kyle Stanford, Pitch Book’s director of U.S. venture capital research. “When fundraising gets lopsided, so does pricing power,” Stanford told Fortune via email. “We can see the mega fund, multi-strategy firms are able to win deals by pricing out the rest of the market, and if they can continue to drive returns with their strategy, then they will be able to command the LP market. VC has changed a lot, and much of that change has been in favor of large funds.” That lopsidedness follows through to exits, where the biggest are massive: This is already the year of the mega-IPO. With SpaceX’s historic debut, a stunning $1.8 trillion in IPO exit value emerged—but that doesn’t mean the IPO window is open for everyone. “There have been a lot of discussions recently about IPOs and what can make them desirable again, and I think the market has just changed,” Stanford said via email. “Being a public company is less glamorous than being a private unicorn… I don’t see a change where IPOs again become the goal of companies.” In terms of where VC dollars are going, the answer is (you guessed it) AI. But there’s an interesting central contradiction: The narrative in VC and startups right now is that all the venture money is going to the top AI companies, and the data bears this out—by the end of May, $274.2 billion in late-stage venture capital had been deployed, and 86.4% of that massive number links to a combined four rounds from only OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI (since merged with SpaceX). So, the largest checks continue being relentle