Pitchbook just released its Q2 2025 Venture Monitor Report. It’s a good read and very comprehensive on the state of venture investing. The big takeaway for us is that venture deal activity is healthy, if not strong. The two charts below really stand out to us.
The report states “In Q2 2025, VC firms deployed $69.9 billion across an estimated 4,001 deals, representing a sharp 24.8% QoQ decline in deal value. This drop was due primarily to the lack of a $40 billion deal in Q2. OpenAI’s deal from Q1 would alone represent roughly 57% of Q2’s aggregate. By contrast, Q2’s largest transaction was Scale AI’s $14.3 billion venture-growth round, which fell well short in scale, despite being the second-largest VC deal ever.”
The report then adjusts for OpenAI by comparing the first half of the year to prior first halves. And sure enough, dollar deployment looks very strong on that basis: “Fueled by select outsized Q1 deals and persistent AI momentum, venturegrowth-stage deal activity surged in H1 2025, with $83.9 billion deployed across an estimated 499 deals. On an annualized basis, this implies $167.8 billion in growth-stage venture capital deployment, far surpassing the 2021 peak of $91.6 billion and marking a potential record-setting year for this Stage.”
All that said, to us the real story is deal count, not dollar volume. And by the looks of it, deal count in Q2 continues to show a down trend from the prior peak in Q1 2024 (yellow line; we’re not sure why one would look at “estimated deal count” especially going back to Q3 2025). Given that, we’d characterize this venture market as less healthy than prior periods shown, as the trend in deal count is down, even though deal sizes are growing.
Thank you for your readership. See more blogs and SaaS data at blossomstreetventures.com. Email the author at sammy@blossomstreetventures.com.
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