Q1 2018 Global Investment Report: jump in late-stage deals pushes total dollar volume to nearly $77B, up 106.8% YoY, while overall deal volume is up 16.4% YoY
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second time in two years Crunchbase's quarterly tally has flagged the same asymmetry. A Q2 2016 report already showed global VC funding propped up by mega deals while the number of deals fell to its lowest since 2013 — dollars concentrating before deal counts did.
Q1 2018 makes the pattern explicit at scale: dollar volume nearly doubles to almost $77B on a surge of late-stage rounds, while overall deal volume grows a comparatively modest 16.4%. The year closes at $300B+ globally, with $100M+ rounds absorbing over half of all capital, confirming Q1 was not an outlier but the opening move.
First-order effects
- Late-stage companies are the immediate beneficiaries: they captured the bulk of the near-$77B quarter, meaning growth- and pre-IPO-stage funds had more capital to deploy than ever while earlier-stage founders saw deal flow grow far slower than dollars.
Second-order effects
- Competing fund managers chasing the same late-stage deals bid round sizes up, which is how the market compounded from this quarter to the full-year 2018 record of $300B+ across 34K+ deals; the same dynamic carried into Q2 2018, when deal volume grew 18.8% QoQ, the fastest since Q1 2015.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the market becomes structurally barbell-shaped — and it did: by [[a:946617|Q3 2019, deal volume hit an all-time high on seed activity while dollar-volume growth plateaued worldwide]], showing the cycle's headline numbers depend on a shrinking set of giant rounds rather than broad-based capital formation.
The trend: Global venture capital is cycling through repeated waves of late-stage dollar concentration, where each boom is measured by fewer, larger rounds rather than wider deal participation.