KPMG says global venture capital hits record $330.9 billion in Q1 2026

KPMG’s latest Venture Pulse figures show a market that is still being pulled around by a handful of giant AI bets. Global venture capital investment hit a record $330.9 billion in Q1 2026, more than double the $128.6 billion raised in Q4 2025, with five U.S.-based companies alone accounting for $188.6 billion of the total.

The biggest name in the pile was OpenAI, whose $122 billion raise towered over everything else in the quarter. KPMG also said Anthropic raised $30.6 billion, xAI $20 billion and Waymo $16 billion, part of a quarter in which ten deals above $2 billion made up more than $206 billion of global VC investment. The firm dated the report April 15, 2026 and said the figures were based on PitchBook data.

For KPMG professionals in deals, tax, audit support, valuation and strategy, the message is less about a banner fundraising quarter than about workload. Money of this size tends to create a chain reaction inside the firm: more diligence on fast-moving tech companies, more structuring work around complex rounds, more revenue-recognition questions, more portfolio company audits and more pressure on advisory teams to separate durable growth from hype. When the capital stack gets this large, the downstream work does too.

The geography matters as much as the headline number. The Americas accounted for 82% of global VC investment, or $270.1 billion, and the United States alone drew $267.2 billion across 3,336 deals. Europe also had a strong quarter, with $25.7 billion across 1,939 deals and six $1 billion-plus rounds, led by Nscale at $2 billion, Neura Robotics at $1.8 billion, Wayve at $1.5 billion, Cloover at $1.2 billion, Advanced Machine Intelligence at $1 billion and Kraken Technologies at $1 billion. Asia reached $33.6 billion, with $2 billion raises for Rokid and DayOne.

That spread suggests the AI boom is not just about large language models. KPMG said capital also flowed into autonomous vehicles, robotics, legaltech, energy management, biotech, defense tech and AI-adjacent infrastructure, with software still the leading sector globally. It also said the quarter saw the largest number of $10 billion-plus VC megadeals ever recorded in the U.S., reflecting a power-law market in which a few winners absorb a huge share of the money and the attention.

The implications for KPMG’s people are straightforward. Hot sectors mean hiring pressure in advisory, larger and more specialized client teams, and a greater risk of burnout in practices already stretched by busy season and promotion-cycle demands. KPMG also said global M&A activity was very strong, with most exit value coming from SpaceX’s $250 billion acquisition of xAI, while fundraising for $1 billion-plus funds was already ahead of the $30.8 billion raised during all of 2025. That kind of market does not just create headlines. It sets the pace for the next round of client work.