The Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor landed with a record headline: $267.2 billion in U.S. venture deal value, topping every full year on record except 2021 and 2025. Read past the headline, though, and it is one of the most concentrated quarters the asset class has ever produced. Strip out the five largest deals and total deal value falls by 73.2%.

That concentration has a clear engine, and the engine is AI. The top five deals alone, led by OpenAI's $122 billion financing, accounted for $195.6 billion, roughly three-quarters of all venture dollars deployed in the quarter. AI and machine learning startups captured 88.8% of Q1 deal value while making up 42.5% of deal count. The dollars are also geographically captive: California alone absorbed more than 85% of U.S. deal value. Add New York and Massachusetts, and you are over 91%. The other 47 states, Minnesota included, are fighting over what is left. The chart below shows this; as you can see, most of the states barely register.

These are not normal venture rounds. They are capital-intensive bets on foundation models, compute, and infrastructure. These kinds of companies can swallow billions, and their economics look nothing like the rest of the market.

As I argued in Is Minnesota Capturing Its Slice of the AI Economy?, the state is not competing at the model layer, and it likely should not try. Our strengths lie elsewhere: med devices, health IT, fintech, and B2B tech.  Expecting an OpenAI-tier round to land here would be wrong.  But the national pattern still finds its way here. Fewer deals, bigger checks.

In Q1, Minnesota recorded 39 venture deals worth $397 million. The deal count runs just under the pace needed to match last year's 171, so we are funding about the same number of companies as 2025, if anything slightly fewer. But the average check tells the real story: it jumped to roughly $10.2 million in Q1 from about $6.6 million across all of 2025. Fewer rounds, more dollars per round. The force reshaping the national market is reshaping ours too, only the numbers are smaller.

MN Rounds this quarter includes: