Crunchbase News Q3 2018 Global VC Report: at the end of Q3, 2018's venture funding totals have already surpassed 2017's, up 41.1% YoY
In Q3 2018, the global venture capital market carried on Q2's lampshade-on-head levels of litness. — Crunchbase News reports that, in the third quarter … Thanks: @holdenthepage
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands on top of an already-hot year: Crunchbase's Q2 2018 report had just logged the fastest quarterly deal-volume growth since early 2015, and Q3 extends it — by September's close, 2018 has out-raised all of 2017 with a quarter still to go, up 41.1% year-over-year.
What makes the quarter worth flagging is where the money sits. The same corpus shows unicorns drew $139B in 2018 versus $85.1B the following year, so 2018's total was disproportionately carried by very large late-stage rounds — a peak shape, not a new baseline.
First-order effects
- Founders raising now price against a market up 41.1% YoY, with late-stage and growth rounds doing most of the lifting — good for anyone selling equity in 2018, harder for funds deploying at these marks.
Second-order effects
- Abundant capital pushes round sizes up the stack: seed rounds of $3M+ nearly doubled their share from 7.8% (2015–17) to 17% (2018–20) across 15,538 rounds tracked by Crunchbase, as investors pre-pay for scarcity of deals rather than compete only at late stage.
Third-order effects
- The follow-on reports confirm the pattern inverted: by mid-2019 dollar-volume growth had stalled even as deal counts kept rising, and unicorn creation slipped from 158 companies in 2018 to 142 in 2019 — pointing to a market where dollars concentrate into fewer, larger checks while broad activity plateaus.
The trend: Global venture funding cycles through a dollar-volume peak driven by mega-rounds, after which growth shifts from cheque size back to deal count — the concentration dynamic the 2019 and 2020 reports document.