Global VC funding in 2017 was highest in a decade at $155B, VC investment in AI doubled to $12B YoY, and VC funding in Asia reached $48B+
KPMG : Tweets: @jasonlk and @jasonlk Tweets: Jason M. Lemkin / @jasonlk : “Global median deal size rose for every deal stage in 2017” ... but ... “Global first-time VC financing fell for the third straight year - to $13 billion across 3,813 deals. http://twitter.com/... Jason M. Lemkin / @jasonlk : “While VC investment was up dramatically, the VC market saw a continued decline in the volume of deals” http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
KPMG's 2017 tally is the opening data point of the arc this coverage has been tracking all decade: $155B deployed, then global VC more than doubling to $300B+ in 2018, peaking at $643B in 2021, and by Q1 2026 reaching a single-quarter record of $297B. The 2017 numbers already contained both engines of that run — median deal size rising at every stage while total volume declined, and AI investment doubling YoY.
The split KPMG flagged matters for everything that followed: just $13B of the $155B went to first-time financiers across only 3,813 deals, meaning the market was already thickening existing positions rather than widening the founder funnel. That is the same concentration pattern visible when four frontier labs captured 64% of the record $297B quarter in early 2026.
First-order effects
- Founders raising follow-on rounds in 2017 faced larger median checks at every stage, while the roughly 3,800 teams seeking a first institutional check competed for a shrinking $13B pool.
- Asia's $48B+ share made it the fastest-growing regional allocation, shifting LP attention toward China- and Southeast Asia-based funds at exactly the moment deal volume elsewhere contracted.
Second-order effects
- With volume falling but median sizes rising, seed-stage investors were pushed toward either larger initial checks or earlier consolidation into Series A syndicates — pricing power moved up-stack to late-stage players writing the biggest tickets.
- AI's doubling to $12B forced generalist VCs to build dedicated AI theses or concede deal flow to specialists, prefiguring the structure where AI takes half or more of total funding.
Third-order effects
- If the fewer-larger-checks pattern holds — which the subsequent $643B peak in 2021 and the AI-dominated quarters since confirm — venture structurally becomes a concentration market: returns accrue to a handful of mega-rounds rather than breadth of bets.
- A shrinking first-time-financing base implies a narrowing pipeline of new companies entering the system each year, which over a decade thins the cohort from which tomorrow's category leaders can emerge.
The trend: Global VC is consolidating into fewer, larger, increasingly AI-concentrated checks — a trajectory running from KPMG's 2017 baseline through the record AI-led quarters of the mid-2020s.