PitchBook and NVCA report: in 2022, US VC deal count fell 14% YoY to 15,852, deal value fell 30% YoY to $238.3B, and exit value fell 91% YoY to $71.4B
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat :
Context & Ripple Effects
This report closes out a year that began with warning signs: PitchBook and NVCA's own Q1 2022 tally showed investments still strong at $70.7B but IPOs and exits collapsing to $33.6B after three consecutive quarters above $192B. By year-end, the exit freeze had spread through the whole pipeline — deal value down 30% to $238.3B, deal count down 14% to 15,852, and exit value down 91% to $71.4B.
The subsequent coverage confirms this was not a one-year dip but the start of a sustained contraction: US VC fell another 30% to $170.6B in 2023, the lowest since 2019, and quarterly reports through 2024 kept marking new post-2018 lows.
First-order effects
- Founders raising in 2023 face a market where exits — the mechanism that returns cash to LPs — generated just $71.4B against $238.3B deployed in 2022, forcing VCs to slow new commitments and stretch existing portfolio runway.
Second-order effects
- With exits choked, later-stage companies stall between rounds rather than going public or being acquired, a dynamic PitchBook later quantified when it found half of US unicorns had gone three years without raising new funding and more than 25% of unicorns had slipped below $1B valuations into 'undercorn' territory.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, capital consolidates into fewer, larger rounds — visible in PitchBook's later finding that AI startups took 86% of US venture funding in H1 2026 across seven $1B-plus Q2 rounds — leaving the long tail of non-AI startups competing for a shrinking share of deal count.
The trend: US venture activity has been in a multi-year contraction measured quarter by quarter by PitchBook and NVCA, with the 91% collapse in 2022 exit value acting as the binding constraint on everything downstream.