87.5% of US venture dollars went to AI, and everything else split the remainder
PitchBook data reported on 12 August puts AI's share of US venture funding at 87.5%. Global startup investment hit a record $510bn in the first half of 2026, with acquisitions at $375.4bn year to date — a decade high, at valuations up to 1.9x last year's.
Concentration figures usually invite a bubble argument. The more useful observation is what an 87.5% share does to everything that is not AI: it does not merely underfund those categories, it removes the comparison set that venture pricing depends on.
The absolute numbers are enormous and still growing — $510bn globally in H1, a record, with more than four fifths of dollars pointed at AI. Exit activity is following: $375.4bn of acquisition value year to date, a decade high, with valuations running as much as 1.9x last year's marks.
The composition is more interesting than the total. Investors are favouring domain-specific tooling over consumer applications — the 12 August rounds included CodeRabbit at $143m Series C for code review and Skan AI at $63m for process intelligence. Neither is a chatbot. Both sell into a budget line that existed before AI did, which is exactly the profile that survives a repricing.
The risk is not that AI is overfunded. It is that a category taking seven of every eight dollars has no external benchmark left to be measured against, and internal benchmarks are how every previous concentration ended.
Fortune — 87.5% of venture dollars went to AI. The rest fought over scraps → · Crunchbase News — Global Startup Investment Hit Record $510B In H1 2026 → · Tech Startups — Venture Capital & Startup Funding Roundup, August 12, 2026 →