Ask any VC if we’re still in a venture capital bear market and that investor will almost certainly tell you no, that funding is still flowing for good companies.
That might sound like spin, because anecdotes abound about how rough it still is for those raising now. And for good reason. Down rounds — that is, raising at a lower valuation than a previous round, which founders want to avoid unless they have no choice — were still at near record highs through the first half of 2024, according to Aumni’s Venture Beacon report. Around 39% of late-stage deals were a down round, according to Aumni’s report. That covers Series B and beyond, with the biggest percentage of down rounds at Series C and beyond.
Even Stripe — whose success no one questions — hasn’t fully rebounded to its 2021 $95 billion valuation as of a big secondary transaction that took place in July. Although it did climb back to $70 billion by then.
But despite this kind of gloom, late 2024 stats are full of good news, too. For instance, new data from Crunchbase shows a downright boom in megadeals — funding rounds of $100 million or more.
Crunchbase tracked nearly 240 mega-rounds for U.S.-based startups so far this year, which is already more than the 210 raised all of last year.
Even more interesting is that Crunchbase’s top category for these deals was not AI. Biotech and healthcare startups accounted for 87 mega-deals, compared to 26 for second-place category AI.
Some of these rounds are admittedly crossover: companies working on AI for healthcare. For instance, Crunchbase calls out AI drug discovery company Xaira Therapeutics as one of the notable health tech megadeals. Xaira launched in April with a massive $1 billion round led by ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs (both known for biotech), but with classic Silicon Valley VCs in the round, too, like NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SV Angel, and others.