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In the chart below, we plot the number of supergiant VC deals announced, by month, from 2014 through the end of January 2020. These numbers are current through mid-February 2020 and may change slightly as historical data is added to Crunchbase and/or rounds get reclassified over time as new information becomes available.

Since the dawn of the “supergiant era,” when the number of these really big deals started creeping upward worldwide in late 2013, startups in the U.S. and China have raised $100 million-plus rounds at a similar pace, despite the U.S. having a generally larger population of startups and more available investment capital overall.

However, economic volatility in China, likely exacerbated by an ongoing trade dispute with the United States, caused a dip in in-country venture investment overall, and a particularly aggressive dip in supergiant VC deal volume, at least when we last checked in in October 2019.

It seems like downward momentum has only continued into the start of the new year. According to Crunchbase data at the time of writing, January 2020 saw fewer supergiant VC deals than in any month since February 2017, almost exactly three years ago.

What’s going on?

Much like how Thanksgiving and end-of-year holidays in the U.S. introduce a certain level of seasonality to the venture capital business here, economic activity in China slows down during the Lunar New Year, which in 2020 occurred toward the end of January. A large proportion of the people living in China’s economic centers like Shanghai, Shenzhen and Beijing return home to spend time with their families.

It’s also possible that the ongoing novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak, centered around the city of Wuhan in Hubei province, has weighed on China’s venture capital market. At the time of writing, there are over 40,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus in China, which has killed over 1,000 people in the country, according from World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, China’s National Health Commission, and China-based DXY.com, a social media site focused on life sciences and pharmaceuticals.

In response to the outbreak, the Chinese central government decided in late January that it would extend the Lunar New Year holiday season to Feb. 2. The move was made to delay the mass migration of people back to and between Chinese cities. (Much like the days surrounding Thanksgiving are among the busiest travel days in the U.S., the days before and after the Lunar New Year holiday are China’s busiest travel season.) That is in conjunction with citywide quarantines in the virus’ apparent point of origin in Wuhan, plus other cities affected by the outbreak.

The overall economic impact of these measures to contain the virus will no doubt be the subject of study for years to come.

According to Crunchbase data at time of publishing, no supergiant rounds have been struck so far in China during the month of February. Crunchbase data lists only five rounds of any size struck so far this month. There are listed for February 2019.

The extent to which the ongoing coronavirus outbreak directly affects the Chinese venture capital market is impossible to know for sure, but it’s certainly not helping the situation.

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Although $100 million is ultimately an arbitrary number, it’s the one we’ve used as the threshold for describing venture capital rounds as “supergiant,” a reference to the most massive and brightest stars in our universe.

According to Crunchbase data at the time of writing, 455 supergiant rounds were struck in 2019, representing nearly $108 billion in reported venture capital dollar volume. That’s down from 2018’s 467 supergiant rounds totaling nearly $148 billion in reported dollar volume. These numbers might change slightly over time as new historical data gets added to Crunchbase or existing rounds get reclassified as more details of those transactions emerge.

At Crunchbase News we’ve written a lot about this phenomenon. We were among the first to document the takeover of venture capital by these massive nine-, 10 and 11-figure deals. (Data shows the takeover started in or around 2013.) We’ve also found they’re not limited to late-stage deal-making. We’ve also tracked geographic trends over time.

The Balance of Power Shifts

The U.S. and China, the world’s two largest economies, are where the trend took off. However, economic volatility in China and the rise of emerging startup markets outside traditional hubs has led to a shift in the “balance of power” in the global venture capital market.

Aggregated data, fresh from early January 2020, shows a continuation of two trends and shows another:

• The large but slightly diminished influence of supergiant venture capital deals in 2019 as compared to 2018.
• The decline of China’s venture capital market amid a continued rise of startup markets outside the U.S. and China
• The outsized chunk of funding attributable to supergiant venture capital rounds in driving growth in emerging markets’ dollar volume totals.

Supergiant venture capital deals accounted for roughly 47 percent of the dollar volume reported for 2019. (Remember that more data may be added over time.) That’s down from 51 percent in 2018. It’s remarkable to think that fewer than 500 deals accounted for a majority of known VC funding in a given year, but that’s just the kind of market we’re in lately.

In combined venture funding, Chinese startups represented roughly 25 percent of known dollar volume in 2018, which, as a reminder, is projected by Crunchbase to be the largest on record. Chinese startups’ share of total reported dollar volume fell to about 17 percent in 2019. A dip in supergiant deal volume is a main driver of declines in China’s overall market as the Chinese economy shows signs of slowing.

Data points to the important role supergiant venture capital rounds play in putting smaller markets on the map, as it were. From 2017 onward, supergiant venture rounds represented a majority of capital raised by startups outside the U.S. or China. It’s unclear whether that trend will continue into 2020, but momentum (and geographic diversity) suggests that the odds are in favor of emerging markets going forward.

Late into a bullish economic cycle in the United States, the rest of the world is on the rise. Startup markets in Latin America, Australia, Africa and Europe are picking up the size of their checks and the pace of deal-making.

Even if there’s a slowdown in the world’s leading economy in the coming years, it’s not like the bottom of the global venture market is going to fall out overnight. The U.S. is likely to remain the largest single market for venture capital in the world for some time to come, even if its slice of the pie may be shrinking.

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Supergiant venture capital rounds are on the rise across all stages, data from Crunchbase shows.

It’s common to associate nine-figure VC deals with later-stage companies.

The first nine-figure round raised was its GV-led Series C, in which the company raised (though ) in 2013, after the company had been around for a little over four years, previously raising just under $50 million along the way, according to Crunchbase data.

Facebook, founded near the beginning of the “unicorn era” (starting in January 2003, as stated in “unicorn startups”)1 raised its first supergiant round in 2007, also three years after launch, and also at Series C.

VC rounds of $100 million or more really took off in 2014 and 2015, as massive amounts of money began flowing into venture capital funds at the far end of the assets-under-management spectrum, which, in turn, began investing ever-larger sums in a subset of startups.

While concentrated in late-stage deals, supergiant venture checks aren’t exclusive to more mature companies.

Series A and Series B deals accounted for between 21 and 37 percent of global supergiant deal volume since 2010, according to Crunchbase News analysis.

This is in keeping with prior research, which indicated that companies aren’t getting much older or younger by the time they raise their first supergiant round.

At least for the past several years, the composition of companies raising supergiant venture capital hasn’t changed all that much. There’s just more of them now.

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But round size inflation isnā€™t happening only at the high end of the deal spectrum. Even at the very earliest stages, bigger checks are becoming increasingly common.

Now, we should clarify that the notion of a big check is relative. For a later stage round, a couple million dollars might look like chump change. But at seed stage thatā€™s pretty substantial. And when weā€™re talking about $5 million and more, thatā€™s enough to qualify as a ā€œsupergiant seed round.ā€

In an effort to quantify the extent to which larger rounds are altering the seed stage startup scene, Crunchbase News put together a U.S. tally of these supersized deals. Our analysis shows that the number of supergiant seeds round has risen sharply in each of the past five calendar years, though itā€™s unclear whether that will continue in 2019.

Below, we break down the numbers, look at some of the largest individual seed rounds, and pontificate about the factors driving investors to put more cash into these most immature of startups.

Supergiant Seed Rounds Over The Years

Letā€™s start by looking at the number of supergiant seed deals over the years.

As you can see in the chart below, the annual quantity of seed rounds of $5 million or more quadrupled from 2014 to 2018.

The second chart, below, limits the dataset slightly, including only startups founded no more than three calendar years including the year counted. The idea here was to exclude relatively mature companies that simply never raised capital before.

Now, examining the above charts, it looks like the supergiant seed trend is slowing in 2019. However, that may not actually be the case. Hereā€™s why: Much of Crunchbase data at the seed stage is self-reported and thereā€™s commonly a lag time between when an investment happens and when we find out about it.

That said, it should be noted that we have no idea whether supergiant seed round reporting has the same lag time as the broader seed category. Itā€™s reasonable to say that the lag time is less, as these are larger, higher profile rounds. On the other hand, a lot of them are companies starting out in stealth mode whoā€™d rather delay alerting the competition.

Representative Sample Of Some 2019 Big Seed Rounds

Thereā€™s no single dominant sector for giant seed rounds. Overall, rounds seem to be broadly distributed, favoring sectors that are popular with seed investors, including fintech, real estate and cannabis.

In the chart below, we take a look at some of the largest seed funding recipients.

Fewer Bets, Bigger Bets

The rise over the past few years of supergiant seed rounds coincides with a decline in round counts at seed stage. Investors are backing fewer companies, and putting more money into the ones they do fund.

As strategies go, itā€™s not the worst one. Presuming the biggest seed rounds go to the most qualified founding teams developing the most impressive new businesses, why not cut a larger check?

Still, thereā€™s a lot that can go wrong. Particularly for companies raising $5 million and up barely after founding, investors have little in the way of a sample product, early customer feedback, or even confidence the team will work well together. Looking ahead, itā€™ll be interesting to see whether the recent crop of supergiant seed recipients grows up to post lower failure rates than the overall seed pool, or if they generate much higher returns.

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Let’s be clear here. Individual companies are taking down more money in single venture rounds than most venture capital funds raise to deploy across an entire portfolio of investments. A prior dive into VC fundraising data suggests that since 2012, half (plus or minus a couple percent each year) of new venture capital funds listed in Crunchbase weigh in at $100 million or less.

While not exactly a new phenomenon (previous analysis of ours determined that the supergiant era began around 2014-2015) it’s a radical departure from the venture business as usual.

In the interactive chart below, you can see the count of supergiant venture capital rounds, segmented by the headquarters location of the companies striking these deals.

Once-remarkable round sizes are now an everyday feature of tech and venture news headlines. Using data pulled from Crunchbase, we can see that, worldwide, there have been at least thirty such rounds announced each monthā€”averaging at least one per dayā€”since March 2018.

But there’s a bigger trend at play now, one that points to a bridge in the gap between the worlds of entrepreneurial finance and geopolitics. China is driving less supergiant venture capital deal volume than it did in the past, while activity in the U.S. and rest of the world remains relatively robust, despite a slight retreat from last summer’s highs.

Back in July 2018, which turned out to be a local maximum of recent supergiant VC deal-making, we wrote about the near lock-step pace of Chinese and U.S. startups announcing nine-figure venture deals.

That’s no longer the case.

The chart below displays the same data as the first one, but in a slightly different way. Here, it shows the percent of monthly supergiant deal volume attributed to startups in the U.S., China, and the rest of the world.

Between January 1 and May 28 of this year, Chinese startups have accounted for just over 20 percent of supergiant deal volume. Compared to the same period of time in 2018, when Chinese companies accounted for 45 percent of supergiant deal volume, it’s easy to see that something has changed.

However, pinpointing what, precisely, changed is difficult. It’s also likely a combination of factors. There’s the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China, with both sides ratcheting up retaliatory tariff regimes. It’s affecting big tech companies, like Huawei, but trade tensions alone are unlikely to cause a slowdown in startup fundraising in the country.

There are other issues at play. China’s economy is still growing, but at a slower pace than in prior years. Data from the National Bureau Of Statistics Of China shows that China’s GDP growth rate has slowed from 7.5 percent annually in 2014 to 6.2 percent today. For some historical perspective: “GDP Annual Growth Rate in China averaged 9.52 percent from 1989 until 2019, reaching an all time high of 15.40 percent in the first quarter of 1993 and a record low of 3.80 percent in the fourth quarter of 1990,” according to .

To an economy with slowing growth, add tumult in debt and public equity markets. China’s main stock market metric, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index, has traded within the same 30-ish percent band for the past four years.

China’s government debt is relatively small compared to its GDP. In 2017, the ratio of China’s government debt to the country’s GDP was 47 percent, compared with 97 percent in the U.S. and 201 percent in Japan. However, corporate debt in China is outsized compared to other major economies. Again citing 2017 figures: China’s corporate debt to GDP ratio was 160 percent, compared to 54 percent in Germany, and 74 percent in the U.S.. Analysis from January point out a trend: that China’s debt is growing faster than its economy.

If the Chinese central government seeks to deleverage the country’s economy, including large state-owned enterprises, some suggest this will further impede growth. Chinese government officials and corporate executives have a challenging path forward, because it costs a nontrivial amount of money to service that debt.

Even if they’re given fiscal carte blanche in the name of growing, high debt loads are difficult to sustain. A recent shows that China is responsible for the vast majority of growth in bond issuance among emerging economies. It also suggests that such high levels of corporate debt will lead to an increase in defaults.

The that one fund services firm, InterTrust, has seen a major decline in China-centric venture firm formation. The FT reports: “InterTrust Funds started to see the impact of the trade war on China-focused funds and China-based funds investing abroad in December. The number of private equity and venture capital fund launches handled by the group has halved every month since then, from an average of about 10 per month last year to about two or three now, said James Donnan, managing director of InterTrustā€™s Hong Kong office.”

Chinese founders and VCs may be feeling the squeeze from a number of different sides, which may result in a more risk-off mindset, leading to a slowdown in funding activity.

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As covered in Crunchbase News’s global VC report reviewing Q4 and the rest of 2018, projected deal volume rose by 32 percent and projected dollar volume jumped 55 percent since 2017. For all of 2018, Crunchbase projects that well over $300 billion was invested in equity funding rounds across all stages of the venture-backed company lifecycle. (This figure includes an estimate of transactions that were finalized in 2018, but won’t be publicized or added to Crunchbase until later. More on how Crunchbase projects data can be found at the end of that report.)

Is the market mostly buoyed by the billions raised by the biggest private tech companies, or is a rising tide in this extended aquatic metaphor raising all ships? In other words, is the bulk of the capital going to only a handful of the largest rounds? Thatā€™s what the numbers show.

In the global VC pool, capital is definitely sloshing toward rounds totaling $100 million or more. In the chart below, you can see what percent of reported global VC dollar volume was raised in ā€œsupergiantā€ rounds versus deals of smaller size.

In the year, over 56 percent of worldwide dollar volume can be attributed to supergiant rounds. With 61 percent of reported capital coming from supergiants in the final quarter, Q4 2018 has the highest concentration of supergiant dollar volume of any single quarter on record.

Big Money Weighs On The Market

Following that same theme, the calendar year 2018 is the most concentrated year on record. In the chart below, we show how much capital was raised in non-supergiant (<$100M) venture rounds over the past decade. (Itā€™s basically the bottom part of the first chart, with the data is aggregated over a longer period of time.)

For the first time in at least a decade (and likely ever) supergiant, $100 million+ VC rounds accounted for a majority of reported capital raised. So in summary: Q4 2018 had the highest share of supergiant VC dollar volume on record, and 2018 was the most concentrated year on record.

On the one hand, the results are not surprising, considering that the biggest-ever VC round (a preposterously large raised by ) and several rivals for that top spot were closed last year. That big rounds made a big splash. It was the year of multi-billion dollar global growth funds, SoftBank, and scooter CEOs worth supergiant sums, at least on paper. But was it good for the smaller players too?

Seed and early-stage deal and dollar volume were both up in 2018, but then again so is everything toward the end of a bull market cycle. The question is, when the bottom falls out, between supergiant and more normal-sized rounds, which has the farthest to fall?

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A major driver of global venture dollar growth is the relatively recent phenomenon of companies raising $100 million or more in a single venture round. We’ve called these nine and ten-figure deals, which shine brightly in the media and are hefty enough to bend the curve of VC fund sizes upwards, “supergiants” after their .

And like stars, venture-backed companies tend to originate and co-exist in clusters, while the physical space between these groups is largely empty.

We noticed that many of the companies behind these supergiant rounds are headquartered in just a few metro areas around the United States. In this case, itā€™s mostly just the SF Bay Area, plus others scattered between Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, and one () in the unfortunately-named Plantation, Florida.

The San Francisco Bay Area is perhaps one of the best-known tech and startup hubs in the world. Places like Boston, NYC, and Los Angeles, among others, are perhaps just as well-known. But how do these cities stack up as clusters for companies raising supergiant rounds?

Superclusters

That question got us wondering how these locales rank against other major metropolitan areas throughout the world. In the chart below, weā€™ve plotted the count of supergiant venture rounds1 topping out at $100 million or more through this morning. These numbers are based off of reported data in Crunchbase, exclude private equity rounds, and do not account for deals which may have already been closed but havenā€™t been publicly announced yet.

Although U.S.-based companies have raised more supergiant rounds (168 year to date) than their Chinese counterparts (160 year to date), Chinese companies raise much bigger rounds, even at this supergiant size class.

How much more? U.S. companies have raised $38.4 billion, year to date, in nine and ten-figure venture rounds alone. Chinese companies have raised $69 billion across their 160 supergiant deals, which includes the largest-ever VC deal: raised by .

2018 In Perspective

2018 is already a record year for venture funding worldwide. With over $275 billion in projected total venture dollar volume so far, 2018’s year-to-date numbers have already eclipsed 2017’s full-year figures (a projected $220 billion, roughly) by over $55 billion.2

And there’s still about eight weeks left to go before it’s New Year’s Eve.

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Weeks later, in August,Ā  itself announced it had from ā€™s via a convertible debt instrument. (Select Crunchbase data is now available on Yahoo Finance, .)

With respect to raising merely enormous venture capital rounds, startups in China and the U.S. are basically neck and neck. But is that also true for an emerging class of companies taking aboard truly titanic sums of capital?

The short answer is no. In the rarified air of raising VC rounds totaling $250 million or more, Chinese companies far surpass their counterparts in the United States and the rest of the world.

The chart below plots the count of quarter-billion dollar (and larger) VC deals, per quarter, from 2013 through the end of June 2018.

A little while back, Crunchbase News began reporting on an emerging phenomenon in the world of VC funding. Startups are raising huge piles of money from venture capitalists, increasingly in sums of $100 million or more.

Because these mega-rounds shined so brightly on the funding landscape, and are so massive as to bend the curve of the market around them, we took a page from cosmology and dubbed these $100M+ rounds ā€œsupergiants.ā€ Much like supergiant stars are among the brightest and most massive celestial bodies in the universe, supergiant rounds are the biggest and often most talked about funding events in all of startup finance.

But now, with supergiant rounds becoming an everyday occurrence, itā€™s necessary to borrow yet another cosmological termā€”ā€”to describe the rare but most massive of VC deals.

The era of super- and hypergiant funding rounds began around the end of 2013. With the exception of a minor pullback from the second half of 2015 through the middle of 2016, the number of nine, ten, and eleven-figure VC deals grew steadily. Fueled by growth in average deal size (particularly at Series C, D, E, and later) backed by ever-larger venture capital funds raised by the most entrenched firms, super- and hypergiant rounds burn the brightest.

Fear

The above chart essentially tracks the inverse of the amount of fear in the private technology market over time.

You can see fear in its fluctuations. The late-2015 to mid-2016 slowdown we mentioned before is known in tech circles as the ā€œSaaS Crash,ā€ a reference to declines in the public value of some cloud and software companies. Those declines spooked private investors deploying capital into younger companies in the same categories.

Fear went up, and hypergiant rounds went down.

Something odd happened next, however. After 2015 brought warnings from well-known players in the venture capital space like that , and the opening quarters of 2016 followed the warnings with closed wallets, investment started to pick back up. And once the hypergiant financing market found its footing, it just kept going up.

Years later, in the current startup and tech boom, some of those same voices have essentially stopped warning about an overheated market. Gurley himself recently that ā€œ[y]ou have to adjust to the reality and play the game on the fieldā€ when it comes to huge rounds and, weā€™d add, the resulting inflated valuations.

Supergiant and hypergiant rounds are on the rise as companies stay private longer and have greater access to capital than in prior business cycles. Those trends are not news. What is news is that the longer the market holds course it must come with more and larger checks to keep the game going.

Thatā€™s a lot of expensive, illiquid risk piling up in a single industry that only recently began to return to a healthy IPO cadence.

How private tech startup risk accretion shakes out in the end isnā€™t clear, but what is easy to see is that the so-called smart money isnā€™t scared. And for that reason maybe we all should be.

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In July, there were , worldwide, which topped out at $100 million or more, totaling just over $15 billion raised in nine and ten-figure mega-rounds alone. This set a record for venture dealmaking.

Weā€™ve already identified approximately when the uptick in huge VC rounds began: toward the tail end of 2013. But where in the world are all the companies raising these supergiant venture capital rounds?

In response to coverage of Julyā€™s record-breaking numbers, were quick to point out that startups based in China raised six of the top ten largest rounds from last month.

Indeed, on a recent episode of the Equity podcast , Chinese startupsā€™ position in the market was a hot topic of conversation. Someone suggested that a series of large venture rounds in China may have preceded the run-up in supergiant rounds being raised by U.S. startups.

At least in the realm of nine and ten-figure venture rounds, that doesnā€™t appear to be the case. The chart below breaks down the monthly count of supergiant rounds by the companyā€™s country of origin.

Here is what this data suggests:

• The first major run-up in nine-figure deal-making took place in the U.S. around Q1 2014, whereas in China that first run-up didnā€™t occur until Q4 2014.
• Especially in the last 24 months or so, supergiant round volume in China and the US is highly correlated, perhaps implying competition in the market.
• We can see, very clearly, the mini-crash in the U.S. through the second half of 2015. For its part though, China hasnā€™t yet had a serious ā€œcrashā€ in supergiant rounds during this cycle.
• Startups outside the U.S. and China are beginning to raise supergiant rounds at a faster rate, although the uptick is significantly less dramatic.

Whatā€™s less obvious in the chart above is just how quickly China became a mega-round powerhouse. The chart below plots the same data as above, except this format shows what percent of mega-rounds originated in each market. Additionally, rather than displaying somewhat noisy monthly amounts, we aggregated data in six-month increments.

After the start of 2013, it only took a couple of years for Chinese companies to consistently account for roughly thirty to forty percent of the $100M+ VC rounds raised in any given six month period.

This also reinforces a trend shown in the prior chart: since the beginning of 2017, Chinese startups and U.S. startups are raising roughly the same number of supergiant venture rounds as one another. That number has risen fairly consistently over time.

Before concluding, itā€™s worth mentioning that our definition of ā€œsupergiantā€ is ultimately arbitrary. $100 million is just a tidy, round-numbered threshold to measure against. Our findings would be similar (if somewhat less dramatic) if we counted, say, the set of rounds raising $50 million or more.

The important underlying trend is that round sizes are getting larger on average. And a supergiant wave of money ultimately lifts all rounds, at least a little bit.

With accounting for just over $15 billion at time of writing, July likely set an all-time record for the number of huge venture deals struck in a single month.

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The table below has just the top ten largest rounds from the month. A full list of all the supergiant venture rounds can be found at the end of this article.

It’s certainly a record high for the past decade. Earlier this month, we set out to find when the current mega-round trend began. We found that, prior to the tail end of 2013, supergiant VC rounds were relatively rare. In a given month between 2007 and the start of the supergiant round era, a $100 million round would be announced every few weeks, on average. And many months had no such deals come across the wires.

Of course, that hasn’t been the case recently.

Why is this happening? As with most things in entrepreneurial finance, context matters.

There are some obvious factors to consider. At the later-stage end of the spectrum, the market is currently awash in money. Billions of dollars in dry powder is in the offing as venture investors continue to raise new and ever-larger venture funds. All that capital has to be put to work somewhere.

But thereā€™s another, and perhaps less obvious, cog in the machine: the changing part VCs play in a companyā€™s lifecycle. The current climate presents a stark contrast to the last time the market was this active in the late 1990s. Back then, companies looking to raise nine and ten-figure sums would typically have to turn to private equity firms, boutique late-stage tech investors, or raise from the public market via an IPO.

Now some venture capital firms are able to provide financial and strategic support from the first investment check a private company cashes to when it goes public or gets acquired. On the one hand, this prolongs the time it takes for companies to exit. But on the other, some venture firms get to double, triple, and quadruple down on their best bets.

But as in Newtonian physics, a market that goes up will also come down. The pace of supergiant funding announcements will have to slow at some point. What are some of the potential catalysts for such a slowdown? Keep an eye out for one or more of the following:

• U.S. monetary policy could change. As stultifyingly boring as Federal Reserve interest rate policy is, very low interest rates are a major contributor to the state of the market today. With money so cheap, other interest rate-pegged investment vehicles like bonds perform relatively poorly, which drives institutional limited partners to seek high returns in greener pastures. Venture capital presents that greenfield opportunity today, but that can change if interest rates rise again.
• A sustained public market downtrend for tech companies. While everything was coming up Milhouse in the private market, a few publicly traded tech giants got cut down to size. Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix all reported slower than expected growth, leading to a downward repricing of their shares. So far, most of the steepest declines are isolated to consumer-facing companies. But if we start to see disappointing earnings from more enterprise-focused companies, or if asset prices remain depressed for more than just a couple of months, this could slow the pace of large rounds and lower valuations.
• Narrowing or vanishing paths to liquidity. For the past several quarters, the count of venture-backed companies that get acquired has slowly but consistently declined, a trend Crunchbase News has documented in its quarterly reporting. At the same time, though, the IPO market has mostly thawed for venture-backed tech companies. Even companies with ugly financials can make a public market debut these days. But if IPO pipeline flow slows, or if otherwise healthy companies fail to thrive when they do go public, that could spell bad news for investors in need of liquidity.

All this being said, thereā€™s little sign that the market is slowing down. Crunchbase has already records four rounds north of $100 million in the first two days of August. Most notably, ride-hailing company Grab snagged another $1 billion in funding (after gulping down $1 billion last month) at a post-money valuation of $11 billion.

If you believe the stereotypes, venture investors are either already on vacation or packing their bags for late summer jaunts to exotic locales at this time of year. But, as it turns out, raising money is always in season. So even though the dog days of summer are upon us, August could end up being just as wild as July.

As promised earlier, here is the list of venture rounds which raised $100 million or more during the month of July.

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