Number of US venture capital firms falls as cash flows to tech’s top investors

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The variety of lively enterprise capital buyers has dropped by greater than 1 / 4 from a peak in 2021, as risk-averse monetary establishments focus their cash on the largest corporations in Silicon Valley.

The tally of VCs investing in US-headquartered firms dropped to six,175 in 2024 — which means greater than 2,000 have fallen dormant since a peak of 8,315 in 2021, in keeping with knowledge supplier PitchBook.

The pattern has concentrated energy amongst a small group of mega-firms and has left smaller VCs in a battle for survival. It has additionally skewed the dynamics of the US enterprise market, enabling start-ups comparable to SpaceX, OpenAI, Databricks and Stripe to remain non-public for much longer, whereas thinning out funding choices for smaller firms. 

Greater than half of the $71bn raised by US VCs in 2024 was pulled in by simply 9 corporations, in keeping with PitchBook. Normal Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, Iconiq Development and Thrive Capital alone raised greater than $25bn in 2024. 

Many corporations threw within the towel in 2024. Countdown Capital, an early-stage tech investor, introduced it will wind down and return uninvested capital to its backers in January. Foundry Group, an 18-year-old VC with about $3.5bn in property underneath administration, mentioned {that a} $500mn fund raised in 2022 can be its final.  

“There may be completely a VC consolidation,” mentioned John Chambers, former chief govt of Cisco and the founding father of start-up funding agency JC2 Ventures.

“The large guys [like] Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia [Capital], Iconiq, Lightspeed [Venture Partners] and NEA will probably be advantageous and can proceed,” he mentioned. However he added that these enterprise capitalists who did not safe massive returns in a low-interest fee surroundings earlier than 2021 had been going to battle as “that is going to be a more durable market”.

One issue is a dramatic slowdown in preliminary public choices and takeovers — the everyday milestones at which buyers money out of start-ups. That has staunched the circulation of capital from VCs again to their “restricted companions” — buyers comparable to pension funds, foundations and different establishments. 

“The time to return capital has elongated quite a bit throughout the business over the past 25 years,” mentioned an LP in quite a lot of massive US enterprise corporations. “Within the Nineteen Nineties it most likely took seven years to get your a refund. Now it’s most likely extra like 10 years.”

Some LPs have run out of endurance. The $71bn raised by US corporations in 2024 is a seven-year low and fewer than two-fifths the whole haul in 2021. 

Smaller, youthful enterprise corporations have felt the squeeze most acutely, as LPs selected to allocate to these with an extended document and with whom they’ve pre-existing relationships, moderately than take a danger on new managers or those that have by no means returned capital to their backers.

“Nobody will get fired for placing cash into Andreessen or Sequoia Capital,” mentioned Kyle Stanford, lead VC analyst at PitchBook. “In the event you don’t signal on [to invest in their current fund] you may lose your spot within the subsequent one: that’s what you get fired for.”

Stanford estimated that the failure fee for mid-sized VCs would speed up in 2025 if the sector couldn’t discover a option to improve its returns to LPs.

“VC is and can stay a rarefied ecosystem the place solely a choose cadre of corporations persistently entry probably the most promising alternatives,” wrote 24-year-old enterprise agency Lux Capital to its LPs in August. “The overwhelming majority of recent individuals have interaction in what quantities to a monetary idiot’s errand. We proceed to count on the extinction of as many as 30-50 per cent of VC corporations.”