So as we’ve discussed recently on SaaStr, at the moment Venture Capital is in a bifurcated world. Big AI Growth rounds are absorbing enormous amounts of capital, a record amount. But ordinary B2B VC deals are down.
We saw that across 2024 per EY and other data here:
And per Sapphire Ventures, 2025 is starting off similarly.
Overall deal count in B2B VC (and VC overall) is down again in January:
- Down -8% from December
- Down -64% (!) year-over-year from the start of 2025
This look at VC deals overall since 2019 show the trend even more viscerally. Deals peaked in mid-2021 … and have simply fallen since then. Even as mega growth rounds into AI Unicorns has kept the dollar volume itself up:
And that’s at the same time as the overall number of start-ups keeps growing.
Look, tech is overall on fire today. The markets remain up, HubSpot and other leaders are at all-time highs or close, and every YC batch is as full as ever. AI is leading to an explosion in innovation and some of the fastest growth we’ve ever seen in B2B.
It’s just, venture capital is hunting an ever narrower sliver of SaaS and B2B companies. The ones at the growth stage growing at massive rates. And the AI-focused early stage ones that just might grow at Cursor-like rates.
The rest? Less interest than a few months ago and certainly a year ago. Bread-and-butter B2B companies, assume funding is harder even than last year.
