Bigger checks, fewer bets: Seattle startup deal count drops to lowest level since 2020

Seattle-area startups attracted about $1.5 billion in venture funding across 69 deals in the first quarter of 2026, according to the Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

The deal count was the lowest since mid-2020, continuing a trend of venture capital concentrating into fewer, larger rounds, with a disproportionate share of the funding going into a smaller handful of promising startups, many of them in artificial intelligence.

By comparison, the Seattle region’s deal value was $2.2 billion across more than 100 deals in the first quarter of 2025, a year ago. At its peak in early 2022, the region logged 152 deals in a single quarter — more than double the latest figure.

It’s a pattern that is also playing out nationally. U.S. startups raised $267 billion in Q1, more than double the prior record, but five deals — including rounds by OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI — accounted for nearly three-quarters of that total. 

“VC has entered the era of consensus deals, and that dynamic will likely persist,” observed the authors of the PitchBook-NVCA report, released Wednesday morning. “Across all stages and series, a small portion of companies is vastly outraising the rest.”

The risk is that the concentration of capital in a shrinking pool of companies could leave much of the startup ecosystem starved for funding even as headline numbers look relatively healthy.

Rankings: According to the report, the Seattle area ranked seventh in the country in the quarter by total capital raised, and 10th overall by deal count. 

The region typically ranked No. 6 to 8 on both measures from 2017 to 2020, but has slipped in various quarters by different metrics in recent years. Austin, for example, has surpassed Seattle in deal value and Miami has overtaken it in deal count.

Space standouts: One bright spot is space startups. Stoke Space in Kent raised $350 million, Starcloud in Redmond landed $170 million, and Portal Space Systems in Bothell closed on more than $61 million, according to PitchBook, including a recently reported $50 million round. 

That’s a combined $580 million from a cluster of companies building rockets, orbital data centers, and spacecraft propulsion systems in the suburbs south and east of Seattle.

AI and infrastructure: Other big deals in the first quarter included a $300 million Series D for Temporal, the Bellevue-based developer infrastructure startup, and $100 million for Seattle-based Overland AI to scale its autonomous military ground vehicles.

Seven of the 10 largest Seattle-area deals in Q1 carried AI tags, mirroring a national trend in which 88.8% of all U.S. venture deal value went to AI companies, according to PitchBook. 

Other notable rounds included a $60 million seed funding for Entire, the developer platform launched by former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, who is based in the Seattle area.

What is Seattle, anyway? Xbow, an autonomous cybersecurity company founded by GitHub Copilot creator Oege de Moor, raised $120 million in a Series C round that valued it at more than $1 billion.

Xbow lists Seattle as its headquarters, but its address is a mailbox at a Pioneer Square co-working space, and its roughly 200 employees are distributed globally — one of the realities of the remote-first era, and a reminder that HQ designations don’t always reflect a meaningful local presence.

See GeekWire’s funding tracker for more recent Pacific Northwest deals.