We are in this position to gain a data-centered perspective on a topic that’s important to us and hopefully important to our readers: The amount of funding that flowed to companies with at least one female founder in the first quarter of 2019.

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For clarity, let’s begin with our bottom line analysis: Seventeen percent of venture dollars representing $8.1 billion in the first quarter went to companies with at least one female founder. Of that, 2 percent was invested in only female founders, and 15 percent was garnered by companies with male and female co-founders. In contrast, 83 percent went to only male founders.

Compared to previous quarters, the first quarter saw an improvement in funding to companies with at least one female founder. Overall we show a dramatic increase year over year, and a healthy increase quarter over quarter from a percent and amount invested in a company with a female founder.

Since 2009 there have only been two quarters that are at 17 percent or higher for venture dollars to companies with at least one female founder. However this is not an indication that the next quarter will be on par or stronger. In contrast for only female-founded teams, we have not seen an increase in percent or amount this quarter.

Breakdown: Are Female Founders Raising Super Giant Rounds

For the last four quarters we have seen an uptick in later stage funding to female founders.

In fact, an increase in the percent in Q1 2019 to female and male co-founded teams is due in large part to investments over $100 million to these teams. The most significant investments in this category are from Asia and one in Europe as reported by our own Natasha Mascarenas for Crunchbase News. These companies include , , , , and .

For 2018, the second quarter produced the largest funding round of 2018, with $14 billion into in China. This round boosted the percent of 2018 fundings with at least one female founder to 17 percent for the year. If you exclude this single round, 2018 would have been around 12 percent to companies with at least one female founder. , the organization bringing together women in venture to support female founders, has set a target of within the next five years to companies with a female founder.

Of the $8.1 billion raised by women in the first quarter of 2019, 16 known rounds were above $100 million, making up for 57 percent ($4.5 billion) of the dollar amounts raised by companies with at least one female founder. For male only founders, $19.7 billion was raised across 75 known rounds representing 51 percent of dollars to male-only founders. Year over year this dollar amount for companies with a female founder has increased close to threefold.

Notable Fundings For Sole Female Founders

Two female-founded companies joined the unicorn leaderboard this quarter.

, founded in 2009 by and J, is an e-commerce site when women can rent designer apparel and accessories. It raised a further bringing the company’s valuation to $1 billion. The round was led by along with . The company has raised a total of $337 million in equity funding.

Meanwhile, founded by starting a beauty blog, which grew into a cosmetic brand with $100 million in revenue in 2018. Glossier raised $100 million Series D minting its new unicorn status at a $1.2 billion valuation. The round was led by , with new investors and .

, founded by and based out of the UK, raised (just over $94 million). Starling Bank, a mobile bank with 460 thousand customers and 30 thousand SMEs, is poised to focus on expansion into Europe, along with extending its banking platform to third parties. led the funding round.

A Look At Lead Investors

Based on announced investments for the first quarter, the leading venture investor by deal count is who invested in eight companies out of 26, representing 31 percent of their portfolio investments with at least one female founder.

“I am focused on looking for great investments, first and foremost, and believe that the secular trends around diversity and inclusion are creating great investment opportunities, said , General Partner and Head of Technology Investing at NEA who had led many of the firms’ investments in female founders said. “Today I find that many of the best opportunities are with companies founded and led by women.”

Further, Florence believes as technology takes on an ever-expanding role in the economy, companies with diverse founders are poised to become even more prevalent and successful.

“As technology permeates more of the GDP and expands the underlying opportunity set, I think we’ll see growing diversity among tech entrepreneurs–a key ingredient for a thriving tech sector and venture industry, and one we intend to play a leadership role in advancing,” said Florence.

Examining Seed Dollars

For this quarterly report, we like to separate seed as this is a leading indicator for future venture rounds. For the first quarter of 2019, the seed percent is lower than the venture percent. Fourteen percent of seed dollars in the first quarter went to companies with at least one female founder. Of that, 4 percent went to only female founders, and 10 percent to male and female co-founded teams. In contrast, 86 percent went to male-only founders.

This percent is an all-time low for the past five quarters. 2018 was consistently 19 percent or above for companies with at least one female founder.

led this quarter with the highest count of investments at 48 in companies with at least one female founder. This includes their most recent of companies, along with follow-on investments from previous cohorts. For the with at least one female founder, this represents around 24 percent of Y Combinator’s investments this quarter.

Y Combinator has invested in this space by creating the Female Founder Conference in 2014, launched Leap which is now an independent company and has invested in , , , , and .

From a Y Combinator spokesperson “To be funded by YC, you don’t need to know anyone — no network within Silicon Valley is needed; anyone can apply to the program. What we look for: smart, talented founders, who have a unique insight into their space and are actively executing on their company.”

In conclusion, let’s circle back to that target nonprofit set within the next five years wherein female founders will own 25 percent of funding. Clearly we aren’t there yet. But, at least for now, we are getting closer.

Illustration: .

The news isn’t shocking considering Austin started off the year with a very strong January, as we reported at the time. The city’s startups raised the majority of total dollars brought in by the state as a whole, as you can see below.

Venture capitalists pumped $493.8 million into Austin startups across 34 deals in the first quarter—a 35 percent spike (in dollars) compared to last year’s first quarter, according to Crunchbase data. Dallas companies’ totals were closer to Austin’s figures than normal, and firmly in second place, raising $245.4 million in 18 deals in the same time period. Houston startups brought in $44.7 million across nine transactions. Two investments were made in San Antonio during the first quarter, valued at $6.5 million.

Overall, Texas dollar values were up at $790.4 million (35 percent year over year) compared to $587.2 million in Q1 2018 although the actual number of deals is significantly lower (46 percent) at 64 compared to 118—indicating larger investment sizes as the state’s startup market continues to mature.

The state has also seen a number of new funds announced this year, including LiveOak’s close of a $105 million fund and the formation of , a new $125 million early-stage VC firm.

Austin Ahead

For Austin, the first quarter validated what we reported in January: the Texas capital’s venture capital scene continues to gain significant momentum. The most recent quarter was easily the strongest for Austin over the past several quarters. Contrasting the above-listed numbers, in the first three months of 2018, 67 Austin startups raised $366 million.

One of Austin’s largest deals in the quarter was AI-powered legal tech startup (and Houston transplant) ’s $83 million Series E raise. Meanwhile, Austin-based construction finance startup raised $60 million in a Series A round.

, managing director of (formerly called ATX Seed Ventures), described the first quarter as having been “really truly gangbusters.”

For one, he noted, the talent pool continues to grow as more companies move here.

“A lot of companies are relocating here, and they’re going to scale up and hire people,” Shonk said. “This causes rounds to happen… Eventually some of those people leave and start their own companies.”

, co-founder and managing director of Austin-based , observed a number of positive events taking place in the Texas capital in recent months, including numerous seed or early-stage funds announcing their launch, triple-digit funding rounds and tech heavy hitters such as Google, Apple and Amazon announcing expansions in the city.

“All of these are indicators that the Austin ecosystem has created a groundswell of entrepreneurial and investment activity to support a booming innovation hub,” he told Crunchbase News. “While we’ve known for a while that Austin exemplifies what is possible outside the coasts, it’s great to see tech heavy hitters and the entrepreneurial ecosystem at-large start to know it, too.”

One trend Shonk noticed in Austin was the wide range of sectors receiving funding. Traditionally, Austin has a long history of funding enterprise SaaS startups.

“There’s been such a heavy focus on B2B and that’s been the city’s bread and butter,” he said. “But now you’re seeing other industries pick up steam, including CPG [consumer packaged goods], real estate, energy tech, supply chain/manufacturing and e-commerce.”

For its part, ATX made four portfolio follow-on investments and one new investment in Q1. It led a $7 million Series A for Houston-based , and also put money in Austin-based and .

Meanwhile, Next Coast Ventures made two new investments during the first quarter, including one with headquarters outside of Austin – , a Utah-based influencer platform for local brands, and , an Austin-based data privacy monitoring platform.

Looking ahead, Shonk believes VC investment activity in Austin will continue to be strong throughout 2019 despite a potential national shakeout spilling over into the city and state.

“Some of the companies that got funded over the past seven years are companies that should never have been backed,” he told Crunchbase News. “I see a correction coming, and I believe Austin will get some of it.”

Dallas

Like Austin, Dallas has predominantly been home to B2B enterprise software startups. However, one of the companies that raised the most in Dallas during the first quarter was actually a biotech company. In February, Peloton Therapeutics brought in $150 million in a .

, managing director of Dallas-based , said overall the funding potential for companies raising venture capital in the Dallas area looked “good” to him in the first quarter.

“I’ve seen a robust number of companies that are raising smaller rounds and this trend of companies raising smaller amounts is continuing quarter over quarter,” he said. “Historically this makes sense as the infrastructure to build a technology company is less capital intensive as it was even just a few years ago.”

Of the startups his firm looked at, “well over 50 percent” were in the SaaS or software infrastructure space.

“Software, as Marc Andreessen states, is eating the world,” Mendoza said. “But software in the medical services vertical was less ‘hot’ than in previous quarters.”

In the first quarter, Aristos Ventures invested in three companies. Two of those— and —are Dallas-based. The other, Houston-based , is a “smart assistant” for oil and gas.

Looking ahead, Mendoza is cautiously optimistic about the VC funding landscape for the remainder of 2019. He is concerned about potential macroeconomic headwinds, specifically on how they could affect customers purchasing a portfolio company’s products, for example, as well as the pressure a potential acquirer of a portfolio company could face.

Houston

Although Houston is the largest of all Texas cities, it (as is typical) lagged behind Austin and Dallas when it came to VC funding in the first quarter. Like Dallas, the company that brought the most venture funds in Houston during the quarter was a biotech startup, . The company counts as a backer.

, a partner at Houston-based , said he was up to his “eyeballs” in deals over the first quarter.

“My normal cadence is to do one deal every three quarters,” he told Crunchbase News. “In the first quarter, I did two deals and if I’d had my druthers, I would have done three. I’ve been trying to convince a company in Houston to take my money but they have too many options.”

Mercury Fund participated in a seed round in Austin-based-, an iPaaS (integration platform as a service) startup. (That round was led by San Antonio-based Active Capital.) Mercury Fund also invested in Washington, DC.-based  during the quarter.

Gilani believes a big deal for the Houston startup scene has been accelerator which gives local companies a place to grow out of.

“There are over 200 startup members of Station Houston,” he said. “If you’re a VC and looking to deploy money, you can just go there and park in a chair and eventually, every startup in town will pass by. It’s made life a lot easier for investors.”

He also describes the recent establishment of nonprofit as being the “biggest game changer” Houston has seen in awhile. Last fall, the organization to invest in funds aimed at boosting the city’s tech scene.

Despite all the exciting venture activity buzzing in Texas’ larger metros, Austin continues to reign as the state’s startup capital in terms of dollars invested and number of startups. However, with dollars-invested scaling up nationwide, we wouldn’t be surprised if the state’s total venture funding hits the $1 billion mark in the next year or two. That should make for some Texas-sized news ahead.

Illustration:

And that means it’s time to take all the charts we’ve put together so far and post them. This chart digest, a regular part of our venture reporting cycle, is a bit more important than usual this time. That’s because we squeezed our global and North American venture capital reporting work into the same post for Q1 2019.

It was fun to do, but also means we had to be a bit cheap with what made the cut. So let’s begin with all the global charts, for those of you with an international perspective:

Illustrations: .

There’s one where VCs listen to founders hawk their shares and make deals to gain purchase in growing companies, all for a cut of the eventual upside.

And then there’s the table where venture capitalists negotiate subscription agreements with limited partners—the institutional money managers and (ultra) high-net-worth folks who, more often than not, are simply seeking (if not always achieving) asymmetric returns on capital via alternative asset classes, like equity stakes in high-growth private companies.

With this in mind, the following report will cover three dimensions of the venture ecosystem:

• The money investors commit to technology ventures across all stages of the private company lifecycle.
• Investment in the investors.
• A survey of exits by way of IPOs and M&A.

And just in case you’re short on time, here’s a quick bullet list of what you should take away from venture capital in Q1 2019:

• Crunchbase projects that just under $75 billion was invested in almost 8,100 funding rounds, worldwide, in Q1 2019. This is down markedly from highs set in Q4 2018.
• Data points to a weakening market for Chinese startup equity as a principal contributor to overall declines. North American companies weren’t immune either.
• Startup and new venture fundraising remain historically high despite a slowdown. Though small-dollar startup investment deals are down, the global perfusion of micro ($25M – $100M) and nano (<$25M) venture capital funds continues apace.
• The U.S. government shutdown at the beginning of Q1 put a damper on new public stock offerings on American markets. However, the march to public markets resumed, shuttling Lyft out the IPO window and lining up several candidates for Q2 debuts.

Now let’s dive into the details.

Money Into Startups

In a nutshell, here’s what’s going on in the world of venture at the end of Q1: Worldwide deal volume pulled back slightly, but dollar volume slipped even further.

In the current venture market, nine, ten, and eleven-figure startup investment deals are a regular occurrence. There have been 103 supergiant VC rounds (raising $100 million or more) reported in Q1, averaging more than one per day.

As of Q4 2018, venture rounds in this size class comprise a slim majority of reported dollar volume in any given quarter. There were 130 supergiant VC rounds in Q4 2018. A dip in big deals bodes poorly for aggregate market numbers, and it’s part of what drove declines in Q1 dollar volume, which we’ll discuss in uncomfortable levels of detail shortly.

Though this report will primarily analyze projected data from Crunchbase, which aims to compensate for historical patterns of reporting delays in private company finance, a snapshot of reported data (that’s already listed in Crunchbase) suggests China’s venture market led the worldwide charge downward. (For more about reported versus projected data, check out Crunchbase News’s Methodology page.)

It’s plain to see in the chart of supergiant VC rounds above that China was neck-and-neck with the U.S. for several quarters until it very suddenly wasn’t. For Q1 2019, Crunchbase data lists 22 supergiant rounds raised by China-based companies. There were 38 reported in Q4 2018, and 50 in Q3 of that year.

But when it comes to the question of where the billions went (or perhaps, more properly, didn’t go), China is not the only answer. As we’ll see in subsequent sections, the Q1 pullback affected North America as well.

Deal Volume Totals

We’ll start by looking at deal volume, which continues a multi-quarter downtrend.

The contraction in round counts may be a sign of tougher times for startup entrepreneurs looking to secure venture funding. We’ll see in a later section of this report that venture capital dollar volume is down as well—much more sharply so, primarily due to a significant drop-off in supergiant ($100 million or more) VC deals. However, Q1 data indicates that rounds remain historically large across all stages.

Crunchbase projected data says that globally, about 8,097 deals were struck in Q1 2019 worldwide, down 3 percent from last quarter, but up 6 percent from last year. Angel-Seed investments led the pack in the quarter.

A Snapshot Of U.S. And Canadian VC Deal Volume

In Q1 of 2019, the number of U.S. and Canada-based startup rounds across all stages hit its lowest point in five quarters. Altogether, companies in the area closed just shy of 3,000 rounds in Q1, according to Crunchbase projections, down from just over 3,400 in the prior quarter.

Deal counts were down for seed through late stage. But the drop was steepest at early stage, where the number of rounds fell by a whopping 33 percent quarter-over-quarter.

Dollar Volume Totals

Venture investment totals were down some in Q1 2019 compared to the sky-high levels of the prior quarter.

Crunchbase projects that roughly $74.96 billion was invested across all stages, down a considerable 19 percent from last quarter’s global highs. This being said, on a year-over-year basis, Q1 2019 comes out ahead of Q1 2018 in terms of dollars invested.

Investment totals were down from Q4 of 2018 levels across all stages except for Technology Growth rounds. However, given that Q4 was the most extravagant quarter for venture funding in the history of the Crunchbase dataset, a dip isn’t entirely surprising. Moreover, investment was still running at historically high levels in Q1. Sure, it could go down further, but we’re certainly far from bear market territory.

For U.S. and Canadian upstarts, Q1 still ranked as the second-richest of the past five quarters, with investors putting $36.2 billion to work across all stages, according to Crunchbase projections.

The Changing Narrative Behind Angel And Seed Stage

We’re going to spend a lot of time on this stage of funding. Last quarter, the story was all about late-stage and the mind-boggling sums raised in those deals. In Q1, the focus is shifting to what comes next. Venture investors noted that seed-stage deals appear to be on the decline. However, research published in Crunchbase News suggests a different narrative: that the composition of “seed-stage” funding is itself shifting toward bigger deals.

But before going into the numbers, here’s how we define the “Seed and Angel” stage:

• Seed, pre-seed, and angel rounds.
• Venture rounds of unknown series, transactions of undisclosed type, and convertible notes totaling $1 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less.
• Equity crowdfunding rounds with no listed dollar value, as well as those totaling less than $5 million.

Seed And Angel-Stage Deal And Dollar Volume

We’ll start with the number of deals Crunchbase projects to have occurred last quarter and the year preceding it. We plot global totals, split by geography. We’ll explain these charts as a pair.

And here’s projected dollar volume.

Crunchbase projects that, worldwide, $3.46 billion was invested across nearly 5,200 deals.

Globally, angel and seed-stage deal volume is up both in relation to the prior quarter (Q4 2018) and the same period of time last year (Q1 2018). In terms of dollar volume, however, results are mixed. Compared to the preceding quarter, projected dollar volume shrank back by nearly 17 percent. This being said, relative to the same quarter one year back, dollar volume is up by roughly 17.7 percent. It all kind of all comes out in the wash.

Notably, reported funding data points to stagnation in the growth of seed and angel-stage deal size.

• In our global data, the average deal size at this stage was roughly $1.4 million, whereas the median deal was approximately $700,000 USD or its foreign-currency equivalent.
• Relative to last quarter, the average deal at this stage was nearly 7 percent smaller. Worldwide median deal size remains unchanged relative to last quarter.
• Nonetheless, angel and seed-stage deals have sprouted like seedlings in fertile soil; growth may be hard to measure from moment to moment but over a sufficiently long time it becomes apparent. Globally, Q1 2019’s median deal size is 75 percent larger than Q1 2018’s cohort of deals.

Our global numbers also point to expanding seed-stage equity markets outside the U.S. and Canada.

• Companies in the rest of the world accounted for 66 percent of the angel and seed-stage transactions in Q1 2019, compared to 65 percent in Q4 2018 and 59 percent in Q1 2018.
• Angel and seed-stage dollar volume trends similarly, international companies took down 63 percent of the seed money invested in Q1 2019, up from 51 percent in Q1 2018.

A Snapshot Of North American Angel And Seed-Stage Activity

Angel and seed-stage investment in Q1 of 2019 hit its lowest projected total in the past five quarters. Crunchbase projects that North American startups raised a total of $1.29 billion in seed funding across roughly 1,750 rounds in the just-ended quarter. In Q4, by comparison, about $1.7 billion went to roughly the same number of startups.

The Q1 declines continue a longer-term trend of seed-stage contraction in the two countries.

Notable Angel & Seed-Stage Rounds

Finally, the fun part about sifting through hundreds of seed rounds is that it gives us a chance to spotlight some cool deals we didn’t get to during breaking news days. Here are three startups that raised funding that stood out: , which focuses on making fashionable hijabs; , a Brooklyn startup that wants to make sperm collection easier; and , an -backed startup that lets you open up a store from your phone “in just three clicks.”

When cryptocurrency was hot, it was really hot. Fast forward, the crypto-hype is down, but we saw that startups that focus on cryptocurrency and blockchain are still propelled by new funding.

Early Stage

Next up, we’re focusing on early-stage deal volume. At Crunchbase, “early stage” can refer to the following kind of financing rounds:

• Traditional Series A and Series B rounds.
• Equity crowdfunding rounds between $5,000,001 and $15,000,000.
• Venture rounds of unknown series, convertible notes, and rounds of undisclosed type, so long as they’re between $1,000,001 and $15,000,000 or USD equivalent (in the case of foreign currencies).

Early-stage deal volume appears to be on the decline, and where the deals happen is shifting.

Crunchbase projects that there were just over 2,300 early-stage deals struck in Q1, down more than 16 percent from the prior quarter. This being said, relative to the same time last year, deal volume is higher. Crunchbase data indicates that 61 percent of the projected deal volume occurred outside the U.S. and Canada, a high point over the past five quarters. This echoes the shift in seed and angel-stage deal-making as well.

Yet dollar volume fell. Crunchbase projects that roughly $27 billion was invested in early-stage venture deals in Q1 2019, declining nearly 7 percent from the prior quarter. Unlike with deal volume, which is shifting toward companies outside the U.S. and Canada, dollar volume isn’t experiencing similar relative changes. U.S. and Canadian companies raised 47 percent of the early-stage capital, up from 46 percent in the prior quarter.

Crunchbase projects that just 892 North American companies closed early-stage rounds in Q1 2019, the lowest total in five quarters and down 26 percent from Q4 2018 levels. At the same time, investment totals were $12.6 billion in the just-ended quarter, down just 5 percent from Q4, and the second-highest total in the past five quarters.

As usual, a few large early-stage rounds helped push up average round sizes. Standouts in Q1 include hefty Series B rounds for two Silicon Valley autonomous driving companies: , a developer of self-driving delivery vehicles that raised $930 million in a SoftBank-backed round, and , a developer of technology for driverless cars, which raised $530 million in a Sequoia Capital-led financing.

Notable Early-Stage Rounds

Throughout the quarter, startups were landing impressive early-stage deals. Ride-hailing startup Ola had  (Ola Electric) raise ₹4 billion (~$58 million) in Series A backing.

Also, we saw a cannabis company bringing in cash: , a five-year-old industry leader, landed a $125M round led by, no surprise here, . As we reported on earlier, Flow Kana distributes sun-grown organic cannabis to farmers. To all VCs reading: this was in the top 15 biggest early-stage rounds of the quarter, in case you needed to take cannabis tech more seriously.

We saw a ton of health and telemedicine investment happening in smaller companies this quarter. To sum that up: San Francisco-based became the first mental health unicorn after getting $88 million in a Series B.

Late Stage & Technology Growth

Next up, we’re going to take a look at “Late Stage” and Technology Growth deals. Here is where we find some of the biggest rounds in venture, and some of the final funding deals companies make before moving on to public markets or another path to liquidity.

Late stage is defined as:

• Series C, Series D, Series E, and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention.
• Venture rounds of unknown series, transactions of undisclosed type.
• Convertible notes of $15,000,001 or more.

Technology Growth is defined as:

• Private equity rounds raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So, basically, any round from the previously-defined stages.)

Crunchbase projects that 586 late-stage deals went down in Q1 2019, down over 9 percent from the prior quarter.

The geographic split of late-stage venture and technology growth round counts is pretty even, with the U.S. and Canada accounting for between 51 and 52 percent of global deal volume.

International companies (particularly in China) dominated late-stage dollar volume figures, taking down 69 percent of projected capital in Q2 2018. But now, by happy coincidence, dollar volume is split almost exactly 50-50, in line with the proportional share of deal counts too.

That’s less true in the case of late-stage and tech growth dollar volume, which is concentrating in the U.S. and Canada. Crunchbase projects that $44.5 billion was invested in late-stage rounds in Q1 2019, down a whopping 25 percent from Q4 2018.

By happy coincidence, U.S. and Canadian companies are projected to have raised almost exactly the same amount of capital in the funding groups as their counterparts in the rest of the world.

A Snapshot Of North American Late-Stage And Technology Growth Investment Activity

Funding for late-stage and technology-growth rounds was still running at historically high levels in Q1, but it dipped some from Q4 totals.

All told, U.S. and Canadian startups raised $22.25 billion across late-stage and technology growth deals in Q1 2019. That’s down a bit from the $24.89 billion raised in Q4, but still marks the second-highest total in five quarters. Round counts, meanwhile, totaled just over 300 in Q1. That’s roughly average for the past five quarters.

Where did all the money go? , a Northern Virginia company developing a global satellite internet network, led the pack with a $1.3 billion March fundraise. , a freight logistics platform provider secured $1 billion in a SoftBank-led round, helping round out the quarter’s total.

Notable Late-Stage Rounds

Aside from OneWeb stealing a lot of (deserved) attention, Q1 still had some exciting happenings. For example, two beauty startups, and , became unicorns within two days of each other due to new capital.

We also covered a round scored by , an edtech startup for Generation Z students (read here).

Also notable: led two of the bigger rounds from this quarter, investing in property management startup and (another SaaS company). Viola Growth’s (formerly CEO of , before moving to the other side of the table) Applicaster was his first investment, and why he was excited about it.

Money Into New Venture Funds

2018 was a banner year for new venture fundraising, and Q1 this year is off to a similarly strong start. Crunchbase News’ analysis from last month found that there are now more venture capital funds than ever before, capital continues to concentrate at the top, favoring firms that have been in the business for years.

This is certainly the case with life science investor and startup studio , as well as vaunted Silicon Valley venture firm Accel. Corporations continue to back new venture investment with their own cash. backed ’s half-billion dollar VC fund. Sovereign wealth from the governments of Abu Dhabi, the principal backer of , and elsewhere continued flowing into new funds targeting high-growth markets.

In other words, especially at the larger end of the assets-under-management (AUM) spectrum, Q1 2019 was a continuation of business as usual in the venture game.

Below, you’ll find a table of some of the larger funds announced in the previous quarter.

Last quarter, Crunchbase News also covered the world of micro ($25M-$100M) and nano VC funds. These investors may raise smaller sums than other funds, but their diminutive size enables a kind of nimbleness in strategy that isn’t afforded to firms with more under management.

Below, we share a sample of some of the smaller funds announced or filed for in the first quarter of 2019. You’ll notice that many of them have a specific regional or sector focus, with regions outside traditional startup hubs like Silicon Valley and New York City seeing a number of new funds.

Money Out

As mentioned earlier, venture capital is a two-sided market. VCs raise capital from limited partners, and startups raise money from VCs and individual angel investors. But how do investors at all layers of the capital stack cash out? Liquidity events, which come in two primary flavors: an exit via merger or acquisition, or to list its shares on public markets.

Let’s start first with initial public offerings (IPOs).

IPOs

A federal government shutdown effectively shuttered the U.S. IPO market for the first few weeks of Q1. That exacerbated what was already gearing up to be a pretty sluggish start to the year for venture-backed offerings.

Altogether, an estimated 14 U.S. and Canadian companies with venture or seed funding carried out IPOs in the Q1 of 2019 (full list ), in sectors ranging from biopharma to gaming to cannabis.

However, in a year that is rumored to debut some long-awaited IPOs, the first quarter gave us a taste of what’s to come:  pushed out its massive offering just before quarter’s end, and Pinterest and Zoom both publicly filed on the same day and reminded us that some tech companies can indeed be profitable.

Other than that, we’re still waiting on some of the other unicorns to join the rest of the crowd. How the newcomers do on the public markets will impact other startups in waiting—especially Uber and Airbnb. With a strong start to the year, however, we’re guessing it’s just a matter of time.

Venture-backed M&A

We also sifted through the database to find the biggest and most interesting venture-backed acquisitions from Q1. Some deals were a long-time coming (Uber and Careem), and others were interesting purely because of the diversity of industries they included, from podcasting to marijuana.

We reported on a bunch of these deals at the time of the announcement, but for those who want to quickly scan a table, see below. We also included some transactions involving companies that were previously venture-backed but had since gone public.

North American Snapshot

These days, with Lyft’s IPO in the rearview mirror and , , and other closely watched IPOs closing in, M&A doesn’t get as much buzz in startup circles. Yet while not as splashy as a public market debut, acquisitions historically provide the majority of exit paths for private companies.

For North American startups, particularly in tech, Q1’s M&A tally was relatively hum-drum. We didn’t see any unicorn-sized tech deals. The sole multi-billion-dollar deal came from the medical device space: , a Silicon Valley-based developer of surgical robotics technology, which .

Besides Auris, other big deals included , a branded cannabis company that sold to another cultivator and supplier, , for $830 million, and , developer of enterprise software running atop the open source platform of the same name, which .

The Good Days Are Numbered

Declines aside, the market for startup fundraising remains pretty darn great at the moment. Capital abounds.

This being said, it is very possible that we are seeing something of a turning point in the market. The biggest unicorns, which have raised billions upon billions of dollars, will graduate to public markets.

We are very late into a historic cycle of new company and new investment firm formation. The clock is running, but there’s still time to play the game. Just don’t get caught empty-handed when the buzzer finally rings.

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This time, expect a slightly simpler presentation of data that we hope is both more digestible and actionable.

But that’s all to come. Today, we’re doing an overview of what we’re seeing in the first quarter. Consider this a snapshot, a premonition, an appetizer before the main course.

The Lead-Up

A few words of context before we begin. We live in active times. The venture market has set a number of records in recent quarters, and yearly totals have become staggering. We’ve seen the rise of supergiant rounds and growth in the hypergiant as well.

The proliferation of unicorns continues, even as their number reaches into the hundreds. Late-stage money has been hot domestically and internationally, with China and the US battling for supremacy (more on that shortly).

The other side of this particular coin is the fact that women-founded ventures are still dramatically under-funded, despite the boom. And there are some signals at the seed and early-stage that aren’t as positive as the late-stage market. But the climate, overall, has been a hot-to-boiling for years now.

That may be changing.

Q1 Headline Numbers

Looking at our first cuts of data from the first quarter venture market, and peeking into our projections, a few things become plain. Summarizing, venture capital is still warm around the world, just not as hot as it was in 2018.

It’s too soon to call Q1 2019 a trend. What the data makes plain is that while there is plenty of activity and dollar volume in the global venture market, it’s slipping. For example, Q1 2019 global venture round counts are down from levels set in Q4, Q3, and Q2 of 2018. Compared to the year-ago quarter, Q1 2019 managed to pick up a few hundred more total rounds, but the highs sets in mid-2018 are now firmly behind us.

The story is the same with dollar volume, though more sharply. Total global venture dollar volume in Q1 2019 managed a small increase compared to its year-ago period while falling short of each intervening quarter. The gap between Q1 2019 and the final three quarters of 2018 are stark in dollar terms, with the most recent quarter around $9 billion down compared to Q3 2018, to over $17 billion off when compared to Q4 2018. After late-stage money surged throughout 2018, Q1 2019 put up the lowest late-stage figure that we’ve seen in at least four quarters.

So, compared to the year-ago period, rounds are up a little, and dollar volume up a few billion. But Q1 2019 was the smallest quarter that we’ve seen in venture in quarters of time. That’s material.

Supergiant Turbulence

Putting the late-stage decline into context, prepared a chart for you. The following graphic shows running counts of supergiant ($100 million and greater) funding events in the US, China, and the rest of the world.

A quick point of order before you dive in–the individual data points are set in circles; the lines themselves are a two-quarter moving average.

China hasn’t been so close to the rest of the world since late 2015, making Q1 2019 all the more interesting. Indeed, given that we noted above that late-stage money had slowed, it appears that China’s rapid decline in supergiant-volume could be the key mover.

Recall that China’s , , and the country’s stock market . As such, seeing a slowdown in the country’s largest venture bets isn’t too surprising. The scale of the decline, however, may be.

What’s Ahead

It’s easy to look at the data (more to come in three days, hang tight) to state that because dollar and deal totals are up year-over-year, the venture market is fine. I’d hazard against that sort of thinking.

The venture market is not seasonal in the same way that Amazon’s revenue is, making sequential quarter-fluctuations part of the game. Sure, there are supposedly better and worse times to raise, but to have a first-quarter tally come in as far under a Q4 tally as we are seeing (recall that the dollar volume gap from Q4 2018 to Q1 2019 is more striking than deal volume decline over the same interval) sparks more concern than a modest year-over-year gain can ease.

So the venture market looks pretty good, just not as good as it was before. And the Chinese late-stage market looks especially weak.

More to come!

Illustration: .