First-order effects

• Founders raising at scale and the limited partners funding them are the direct beneficiaries: with over half of all venture capital flowing through $100M+ rounds, late-stage companies captured the overwhelming majority of new capital in 2018.
• Early-stage founders face a thinner slice of the pie — the 34K+ deal count grew faster than the dollars available outside mega-rounds, tightening competition among seed and Series A investors for non-mega deals.

Second-order effects

• The concentration sets up the 2019 dynamic Crunchbase later documented: a record year for deal count but slightly lower dollar volume, with giant rounds shrinking to 455 worth ~$108B — suggesting 2018's mega-round wave pulled capital forward rather than establishing a new baseline.
• Seed-stage investors respond by competing harder on the volume side of the market; the following quarters show deal counts hitting all-time highs on seed growth while dollar growth plateaus.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, venture becomes structurally barbell-shaped — thousands of small deals at one end, a few hundred giant checks at the other — which is exactly the shape the market shows by 2021, when global funding reached $643B with late stage alone accounting for $413B.
• The 2018 data point becomes the reference year for measuring whether subsequent growth is broad-based or another round of top-heavy concentration, a question every later Crunchbase annual report implicitly answers.