VC mega deals are booming, and artificial intelligence is surprisingly not the most popular category

Ask any VC if we are still in a enterprise capital bear market and the investor will almost actually say no, that funds are still flowing into good corporations.

This may sound like a stretch, as there are loads of anecdotes about how difficult this task is for those currently upping the ante. And for good reason. Downside rounds, which are raises at a lower valuation than the previous one which founders wish to avoid unless they haven’t any selection, continued to stay at near-record levels in the first half of 2024, in response to the data. Beacon of the Aumni Expedition report. According to Aumni’s report, roughly 39% of late-stage deals failed. This applies to series B and subsequent ones, with the highest percentage of rounds lost in series C and later.

Even Stripe – whose success nobody disputes – hasn’t fully recovered to its $95 billion valuation for 2021, stemming from a big secondary transaction that took place in July. Although by then it had grown to $70 billion.

But despite this sort of gloom, the statistics for the end of 2024 are also filled with excellent news. For example, recent data from Crunchbase it actually shows a boom in megadeals – financing rounds price $100 million or more.

Crunchbase has recorded almost 240 mega rounds for US startups this 12 months, which is already greater than the 210 raised in all of last 12 months.

What’s much more interesting is that Crunchbase’s most popular category for these deals wasn’t AI. Biotech and healthcare startups closed 87 mega-deals, in comparison with 26 for the second-place AI category.

Some of those rounds are admittedly cross-border: corporations working on artificial intelligence for healthcare. For example, Crunchbase lists AI drug discovery company Xaira Therapeutics as certainly one of its notable medtech megadeals. Xaira launched in April with a large $1 billion round led by ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs (each known for biotech), but the round also included classic Silicon Valley VCs comparable to NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners , SV Angel, and others.

We’d probably call Xaira an AI company and put it on our current list tracking AI startup megadeals.

But there have been also offers like: Superluminal Medicines’ $120 million Series A roundhosted by Eli Lilly. While it also uses machine learning to speed up drug development, its focus is on finding drugs for specific small molecule receptors on cell membranes. This is a hot area in biotech at once – no AI cleanup required. The deal was backed by classic tech investors Insight Partners and Gaingels, in addition to NVentures (Nvidia’s enterprise capital arm), which appears to be in all places today.

Other Series A and B biotech megadeals include the finalized $120 million Series B deal field therapy, who also works on small molecule drugs; and 100 million series A Judah Bio landed to cope with kidney meds. It looks like every week a brand new biotech megadeal is announced.

Apart from medical technologies and artificial intelligence, one other sector that is having fun with great interest is cybersecurity – 16 such transactions have been concluded up to now this 12 months. Examples include email security startup Kiteworks, which raised $456 million, data security startup Cyera, which raised $300 million, and cloud security startup Wiz, which raised a whopping $1 billion.

There are several other trademarks for earlier stage founders. Aumni found that pre-launch valuations improved barely for seed and Series A deals in the first half of the 12 months.

Deal closing in 2024 also appears to be at an identical pace to 2023, in response to the Q3 survey. Venture PitchBook-NVCA monitor. In 2023 almost 16,000 transactions were concludedwhich is barely higher than the average annual activity before the pandemic and ZIRP-fueled madness in 2020-2021.

For those concerned about learning more, TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 will feature a session on the Builders Stage titled “What You Need to Raise a Series A Today” and one other on “How to Raise in 2025 If You’ve Broken, Failed or Round extending.”