A venture capital monitor recorded a second down year in 2023

The signal

In the venture capital corner of money & markets, the Q4 2023 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, published on 10 January 2024, states that US venture investment fell for a second consecutive year. The report states that 2023 saw $71.6 billion less capital invested in the asset class than in 2022, a gap that narrows to $88 billion when the unusually large funding rounds raised that year by OpenAI and Anthropic are excluded. The same report states that deal count in the fourth quarter of 2023 remained higher than in any quarter recorded before 2020, a detail separating the number of transactions from the dollar value of a shrinking number of very large ones.

The evidence

The Venture Monitor is a quarterly series jointly produced by PitchBook, a private-markets data provider, and the National Venture Capital Association, the industry's trade body; NVCA's own hosting of the report confirms it as a joint publication rather than a vendor product alone. That structure matters for how the figures should be read: PitchBook compiles deal-level data, largely self-reported by investors and companies, and NVCA supplies the trade association's standing and distribution to the industry it represents. This is a monitor of private transactions, not an audited statistical series; its exact universe of deals and revision history are not independently published the way a government release's would be. The report's own framing, distinguishing capital invested from deal count and separating headline totals from the effect of a small number of outsized rounds, is itself evidence that 2023's decline was concentrated rather than uniform.

Timeframe and confidence

The comparison stated in the report is 2023 against 2022, not against the 2021 peak year for venture funding; this record does not establish a specific 2021 figure, so any comparison beyond 2022 should not be assumed from it. This is an editorial reading: a one-year, vendor-industry monitor comparing two adjacent years is useful evidence of direction but a thinner basis for judging whether a floor has been reached than a longer published time series would be.

What would change the reading

Subsequent Venture Monitor editions showing deal value stabilising, rising, or falling further would show whether 2023 was a trough or a step in a longer decline. A published, methodologically comparable series stretching back to the 2021 peak, from the same source, would let a far-below-peak comparison be made on stated figures rather than left as background context.

• Did total venture deal value stabilise, recover, or fall further in the years after 2023?
• How much of any recovery, if one occurred, was concentrated in a small number of very large AI-related rounds?
• Did deal count, which stayed relatively high through 2023, continue to diverge from deal value in later quarters?

The report is best read as a vendor-and-trade-body monitor of a lagging, self-reported market: informative on direction and concentration, but its comparisons should be quoted only as far as the report itself states them.

Source trail

1. Q4 2023 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitorpitchbook.com · Source publication: 2024-01-10 · Retrieved 2026-09-16

   States 2023 US venture investment was $71.6 billion less than in 2022 ($88 billion less excluding OpenAI's and Anthropic's large rounds), and that Q4 2023 deal count remained higher than any pre-2020 quarter.

2. Q4 2023 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor (NVCA document listing)nvca.org · Source publication: not established · Retrieved 2026-09-16

   Confirms NVCA as co-publisher of the same Q4 2023 Venture Monitor report, hosting it for the venture capital trade association's own membership and policy audience.

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