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
Jason D. Rowley / Crunchbase News : Thanks: @jason_rowley
Context & Ripple Effects
Crunchbase's Q1 2018 Global Investment Report marks the moment late-stage money detached from deal counts: dollar volume nearly doubled year-over-year to almost $77B while overall deal volume rose only 16.4%, meaning a shrinking slice of rounds carried most of the capital. The follow-on coverage confirms this was not a one-quarter blip — Q2 2018 posted the fastest quarterly deal-volume growth since Q1 2015, and the full-year tally reached $300B+ across 34K+ deals, with $100M+ rounds absorbing over 56% of all capital.
What makes the Q1 2018 print analytically useful is how cleanly it foreshadows the cycle's shape: by mid-2019 dollar volume had stalled (Q2 2019's report called 2019 unlikely to exceed 2018's highs), even as seed-stage activity pushed deal counts to records, and the same late-stage-heavy signature reappeared at scale in H1 2021's $288B all-time high.
First-order effects
- Late-stage companies and their existing backers captured nearly all of the quarter's capital growth — a 106.8% YoY jump in dollars against a 16.4% rise in deals means average round size, not deal count, did the work.
- Founders raising early rounds faced a market where headline funding totals overstated their access: the marginal new dollar went to proven late-stage names.
Second-order effects
- Seed and Series A investors responded to the late-stage squeeze by competing on volume rather than check size — visible two years later when Q3 2019's record deal count was driven entirely by seed-stage activity while dollar growth flatlined.
- The concentration set the benchmark for subsequent quarters: once 2018's late-stage totals became the reference point, every later report was measured against them, capping perceived momentum in 2019.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, aggregate venture 'market health' metrics decouple into two signals — deal volume tracking early-stage sentiment, dollar volume tracking a small pool of late-stage mega-rounds — making headline totals an unreliable gauge of startup funding breadth.
- The recurring late-stage surge-and-plateau cycle (2018 peak, 2019 stall, 2021 record) points toward venture markets behaving cyclically around concentrated capital pools rather than expanding steadily with the number of funded companies.
The trend: Global venture dollar volume is increasingly a function of a narrow band of late-stage mega-rounds that spike and plateau on their own cycle, independent of broad deal-count trends.