Our Take
Concentration, not activity, is the real story—a handful of mega-funds are monopolizing dry powder while most startups compete for scraps in a narrower funnel.
Why it matters
If you're raising outside the AI consensus picks, you're watching capital pools shrink even as total deployment hits records. This matters now because it signals which founders can still reach institutional capital in the next 12 months.
Do this week
Founders: map your lead investor targets to the active dealmakers by category (Crunchbase ranked them in May), then ask your network directly about momentum at firms outside the AI-focused tier.
Andreessen, General Catalyst, and Y Combinator led the most deals in May
General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz each led or co-led six rounds in May 2026, according to Crunchbase data. Those rounds included some of the largest in the month: Anduril's $5 billion Series H (co-led by Andreessen) and Cognition's $1 billion Series D (co-led by General Catalyst). Lightspeed Venture Partners followed with five lead rounds, while Upfront Ventures and Index Ventures each closed four.
The highest-spending investors, by aggregate capital deployed, were all co-leads on Anthropic's $50 billion Series H. This included Sequoia Capital, Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, Iconiq Capital, and XN. Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz rounded out the top spenders via the Anduril deal.
When counting participation across all rounds of $5 million or more, Y Combinator ranked as the most active dealmaker, followed by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. Y Combinator's high frequency reflects its practice of co-investing in follow-on rounds for companies it incubated, rather than leading new rounds.
Capital concentration is reshaping the funding ladder
The pattern is clear: deal count remained flat while round sizes inflated. Top-tier funds wrote fewer checks but larger ones. This is not a liquidity problem—U.S. venture deployers are putting more money to work than ever (per Crunchbase). The constraint is selectivity.
Most of the capital flowing to mega-rounds is flowing to AI consensus picks. Andreessen, Sequoia, and their peers have raised multi-billion-dollar funds in recent years and are now deploying them into a narrow band of unicorn-track startups. Founders outside that band are competing for capital from smaller, slower-moving firms or facing longer fundraising cycles.
For entrepreneurs in pre-product or non-AI verticals, this creates a secondary effect: the downstream ecosystem (seed and Series A) is also pulling back, waiting to see which big-fund bets pan out before deploying follow-on capital. The result is a more bifurcated market: a few well-funded cohorts and a longer tail of underfunded ones.
Know which bucket you're in and plan accordingly
If your startup is an AI play with a credible team and early traction, you likely have realistic access to the firms dominating the May leaderboard. If not, your fundraising calendar should expect longer lead times and lower check sizes from your tier of investor.
Audit the active lead investors in your category (Crunchbase publishes them monthly by sector). Cross-reference their May 2026 activity and fund size. If your ideal lead investor did fewer than three deals and raised less than $500 million in their most recent fund, plan for a 6-9 month fundraising cycle, not 3 months.
For later-stage founders, the signal is simpler: if your series round is not attracting interest from at least one top-10 fund in the lead, you may be mispriced relative to what mega-funds are writing checks for. Adjust your target size down or your narrative up before the next pitch cycle.