Venture Numbers, Reconciled: Why Every Tracker Says Something Different About 2026

Pick a venture tracker and you get a different answer for the first half of 2026. As of each publisher's latest edition, Crunchbase counts $515B of global venture funding, KPMG counts $560.3B, Dealroom counts $506.2B, and PitchBook-NVCA counts $412.7B for US companies alone. None of them is wrong. They measure different things, revise on different schedules, and put the same mega-round in different quarters. This is the reconciliation.

The reconciliation table: H1 2026

Here is every H1 2026 figure the major trackers have published, with the scope notes that explain most of the spread. Latest vintage first, first print alongside where the publisher has since restated. Where a publisher does not say whether it counts debt, the table says "not stated" rather than guessing. No tracker states whether a round is dated by announcement or by close, which matters later in this piece. Figures are as of September 27, 2026.

Sources: Crunchbase H1 2026 recap and methodology; KPMG Venture Pulse Q2'26 report; Dealroom US guide; CB Insights State of Venture Q2'26; Carta State of Private Markets Q1 2026. KPMG's release gives both $560.3B (which matches its two quarters) and a $560.4B headline; we use $560.3B.

Quarter by quarter, the gaps get smaller and stranger

The quarterly figures show where the H1 gap actually lives. In Q2 2026 three global trackers sit within about $8B of each other: Crunchbase at $205B, Dealroom at $204.9B, and CB Insights at $212.9B according to Foley & Lardner's summary of its report. KPMG sits apart at $227.4B. In Q1 the spread is wider, and most of it traces to how each tracker handled a handful of very large rounds and to later revisions.

Sources: Crunchbase Q1 2026 recap; PitchBook-NVCA Q1 2026 Venture Monitor; CB Insights Q1'26; Foley & Lardner via National Law Review (CB Insights Q2 figure, secondary); KPMG Venture Pulse, United States. PitchBook-NVCA's Q2 report prints an H1 figure but no labeled Q2-only value, so we leave that cell empty rather than read it off a chart.

The 2025 baselines don't agree either

Year-over-year comparisons inherit the same problem. Crunchbase says H1 2026 surpassed "the $440 billion invested in all of 2025" worldwide, per its H1 recap. PitchBook-NVCA puts full-year 2025 US deal value at $319.2B in its Q2 2026 edition, revised from $321.6B in the Q1 edition, and says its H1 2026 total "already exceeds the 2025 full-year figure" (NVCA PDF). Dealroom's US guide uses $282.0B for 2025.

Carta, which only sees companies on its cap tables, reported $119.5B across 4,859 priced rounds for 2025 in its Q4 2025 report. That is not a disagreement with anyone. It is a different population. If you write "venture funding grew X% in 2026," the X depends entirely on which tracker supplies both ends of the comparison, so take both from the same one.

Why the totals differ: seven reasons

1. US versus global

The most common mix-up. PitchBook-NVCA's methodology says "All financings are of companies headquartered in the US," so its $412.7B is a US number. Crunchbase ($515B), KPMG ($560.3B) and Dealroom ($506.2B) are global. Putting $412.7B next to $515B and calling it a disagreement is a category error. The fair US comparison is PitchBook-NVCA's $412.7B against Dealroom's $381.9B, per the Dealroom US guide.

2. What counts as venture: debt, grants, secondaries

Crunchbase's methodology page says it does not count "secondary market transactions, post-IPO transactions, debt financings, grants, non-equity assistance or ICOs" as venture rounds. PitchBook, and therefore KPMG, which uses PitchBook data, "includes deals that include partial debt and equity" and leaves out only debt-only financings and grants. Neither says whether the debt slice of a mixed deal adds to deal value. CB Insights and Dealroom do not state a rule in their public pages. That difference is one plausible reason KPMG's Q2 global figure ($227.4B) sits above Crunchbase ($205B) and Dealroom ($204.9B), but no source quantifies it.

3. Who is in the dataset at all

Carta reported $30.4B of startup funding in Q1 2026 in its State of Private Markets report. That is roughly a tenth of what the market-wide trackers show for the same quarter, and smaller than OpenAI's single $122B round. Carta measures priced equity rounds at companies that run their cap tables on Carta, from data "entered by companies and investors themselves." Its pre-seed series is a separate measure again: $3.19B across 11,546 SAFEs and convertible notes at US startups in Q2 2026, per Carta's pre-seed report. Don't add the two together, and don't read either as a market total.

4. Corporate and private-equity-growth rounds

KPMG's methodology includes corporate rounds for venture-backed startups (since March 2020) and excludes rounds PitchBook tracks as private equity growth. Crunchbase excludes "private equity rounds in non-venture-backed startups" and says nothing about corporate rounds. A multi-billion-dollar round that one tracker classifies as venture and another as PE growth or strategic investment moves a quarterly total by the full amount.

5. When a mega-round lands

No tracker publishes a rule for dating a round by announcement, first close or final close. Crunchbase's methodology page notes that "there's usually a gap of several weeks between finalizing paperwork and public disclosure," and KPMG's Q2 report counts add-ons to rounds "announced in Q1'26" in Q2. When a single round is worth tens of billions of dollars, that choice decides which quarter looks like a record. The next section walks through the two rounds that matter most in 2026.

6. Data vintage: every tracker revises

All of these databases fill in after the fact. Crunchbase moved Q1 2026 from $300B to $305B and H1 from $510B to $515B, and warns that "seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year" (see its August recap). PitchBook-NVCA moved 2025 from $321.6B to $319.2B. CB Insights' Q2 quarter-over-quarter changes only work if Q1 was restated upward from its first-reported $285.5B, but the new figure isn't public. Carta's first prints get revised upward as companies enter data; its Q1 2026 pre-seed report said over $2.3B and expected the total "to reach around $2.9 billion." A Q1 figure from April and a Q1 figure from July are different numbers. (We could not independently confirm a KPMG Q1 2026 restatement beyond its original $330.9B global / $267.2B US prints as of this writing, so those figures are not included here as a revision.)

7. Projections, estimates, and shared providers

Dealroom's "on track to land at $1.0T" for 2026 globally and $763.9B for the US are annualised projections from H1, not actuals, per its global guide. PitchBook's labeled deal counts (9,646 for H1 2026) are estimated counts, and Crunchbase counts startups funded, not deals, so deal counts don't compare across sources either. And some trackers are one dataset in two outfits: KPMG's Venture Pulse runs on PitchBook data, and KPMG's first-print US Q1 2026 figure ($267.2B) matches PitchBook-NVCA's Q1 figure exactly. TechCrunch reports Crunchbase data and Axios reported PitchBook-NVCA's. Four headlines can be two datasets.

Mega-round dating: OpenAI and Anthropic

OpenAI's $122B: same size, same quarter, different share

OpenAI's $122B financing is the easy case. Every market tracker that reports it puts it in Q1 2026 at the full $122B. What differs is how much of each tracker's quarter it represents. CB Insights said the round "accounted for 43% of all funding during the quarter" and that without it Q1 would have been $163.5B, per its Q1'26 report. Crunchbase grouped it with Anthropic ($30B), xAI ($20B) and Waymo ($16B): four rounds totaling $188B, or 65% of its first-print $300B quarter, per its Q1 recap. Any "AI share" or "concentration" statistic for 2026 is mostly a statement about this one round and its denominator.

Sources: PitchBook-NVCA Q1 2026 (p.4); KPMG Q2'26 report (p.2); Dealroom global guide; Carta Q1 2026.

Anthropic: $30B in Q1 at Crunchbase, $65B in Q2 at three others

Anthropic is the hard case. Crunchbase's Q1 recap lists "Anthropic ($30 billion)" among the quarter's top four rounds. In Q2, PitchBook-NVCA, KPMG and CB Insights all attribute $65B of Anthropic financing to the quarter, but they describe it differently. KPMG calls it "a $65 billion raise by US-based LLM Anthropic," one round, in its Q2'26 release. CB Insights says "Anthropic alone accounted for three of the quarter's five largest financings," per its State of AI Q2'26. PitchBook-NVCA adds the caveat that matters most: "$15 billion of Anthropic's $65 billion round was committed earlier, so the figure cited in media headlines overstated the new money" (Q2 2026 Venture Monitor). It does not say whether its own total counts the full $65B or only the new money.

Crunchbase's H1 recap says OpenAI and Anthropic together "accounted for $217 billion — 43% of all startup funding in H1." By Value Add VC's arithmetic, not Crunchbase's statement, $122B + $30B + $65B = $217B, which suggests Crunchbase counts both the $30B Q1 round and a $65B figure in Q2. What no source establishes is whether the $15B "committed earlier" overlaps the $30B Q1 round, and so whether any tracker counts some Anthropic money twice across quarters. We are treating that as an open question, not a finding. Until a tracker publishes its dating rule, the safest citation is the quarter-specific figure with the tracker named.

Which number to cite for what

• US venture total: PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor ($412.7B for H1 2026, US-headquartered companies, as of June 30, 2026). It breaks out AI ($355.9B, 86%) and rounds under $100M ($51.4B, 12.5%) per the NVCA PDF.
• Global total, equity only, updated monthly: Crunchbase. Name the month and the snapshot date: August 2026 was $42B into just over 1,500 startups, "Data is as of Sept. 2, 2026," per the August recap.
• Global total including mixed debt-equity deals, with regional splits: KPMG Venture Pulse (Q2 2026: $227.4B across 8,440 deals globally; Europe $25.6B). Don't cite it next to PitchBook-NVCA as independent confirmation. It is the same underlying data, per the KPMG release.
• Deal counts, mega-round share, median deal size: CB Insights (Q2 2026: 263 mega-rounds took 81% of funding, per its report page). Its exact Q2 total, deal count and $4.2M median deal size come from Foley & Lardner's summary, so attribute them that way until you have the full report.
• Priced-round terms and early-stage behavior: Carta, labeled "companies on Carta." Never as a market total.
• Full-year 2026 "on track" figures: Dealroom's $1.0T global and $763.9B US are projections. If you cite them, say so in the same sentence.
• Individual rounds: the company's own announcement or filing first; tracker round lists second. Round-level detail is where rounds tracked by Value Add VC are useful (see below).

Three rules cover most mistakes. Take every figure in a comparison from the same tracker. Say which edition you used, since the same quarter changes between April and July, as of each publisher's revisions above. And never add figures from different trackers together, or combine one tracker's quarters into a total it has not published itself.

Q3 2026 update: still waiting on the trackers

As of October 1, 2026, no tracker had published a Q3 2026 total. Crunchbase's own venture news page shows no Q3 2026 global recap yet — its most recent monthly piece is the August 2026 global recap, published in early September. Dealroom's global guide, which updates continuously rather than on a report schedule, still shows Q2 2026 ($204.9B) as its most recent closed quarter, last updated July 23, 2026 — no closed Q3 bar yet.

Crunchbase has been first out all year: its Q1 and H1 recaps landed on April 1 and July 2, per its Q1 recap and H1 recap, both the day after quarter-close — so an Oct 1-2 Q3 recap was the expectation, and as of this publish it had not landed. The other trackers have not stated Q3 release dates either: PitchBook-NVCA's Q2 2026 Venture Monitor PDF was dated July 8 (about a week after quarter-close), so its Q3 edition could land as early as roughly Oct 7-8. CB Insights listed its Q3 2025 report on October 15, 2025, and its Q2 2026 report on July 7, pointing to a Q3 2026 report around Oct 7-15. KPMG's Q2 2026 report was dated July 15 with the press release on July 23, pointing to a Q3 edition in mid-to-late October. Carta's State of Private Markets for Q2 2026 had not appeared as of September 27, and its Q3 2025 edition came out in November 2025, per its report archive — its Q3 2026 edition is expected in November.

What to watch once Crunchbase and the other trackers publish: whether the gap between KPMG and Crunchbase persists without a $65B round in the quarter, whether any tracker states how it dated Anthropic's financing, and how far each one restates H1. Expect the H1 figures in the tables above to move when the Q3 editions publish, as they did between the Q1 and Q2 editions. This page will be updated once a tracker actually publishes a Q3 2026 total.

Our own numbers, in both definitions

None of the numbers above are ours — they are what the market trackers publish, and we never add to or compare against them. But since this piece is about why trackers disagree, here is a small, honest illustration of the same problem inside our own store: the same underlying rounds, counted two different ways, give two different answers. Neither is a market total; both are rounds tracked by Value Add VC, which covers an estimated 5-8% of US rounds, not all US venture activity.

(a) All tracked private-company rounds, any geography: every funding round we have on record that is not labeled rumored and is not a publicly traded company, with no geography filter — this is the widest cut of our own data.

(b) US + unconfirmed-HQ: the same rounds, run through our monthly venture-data pack, which additionally drops companies with a confirmed non-US headquarters — this is why it counts fewer rounds and a smaller dollar total than (a) for the same three months. The gap between the two rows, (a) minus (b), is 70 rounds / $24,222.6M at companies with a confirmed non-US headquarters.

The growth from Q2 to Q3 in both rows above mostly reflects our own coverage growing — more wire sources, more drip backfill — not a market acceleration. Q2 2026 was (a) 142 rounds / $120,694.8M and (b) 129 rounds / $108,729.4M; Q3's higher round count (407 and 337) is driven mainly by rounds added retroactively throughout the quarter, not by Q3 itself being a bigger quarter for the market. A slice of what shows up as Q3 growth is simply rounds we didn't have in our store yet when Q2 closed.

Both rows computed from the Value Add VC intelligence store on October 1, 2026, after a round-dating fix that moved Prometheus's $12B round from a July date to its correct June 11, 2026 date, per TechCrunch — out of Q3, into Q2. Rumored (in-talks, reportedly) rounds and public-company raises are excluded from both rows; Function Health's $450M General Catalyst CVF deal is excluded as non-dilutive debt, not equity. Not a market total, not comparable to the tracker figures above, and not added to any of them.

What our own data can and can't tell you

Value Add VC keeps a round-level log on the Pulse funding tracker: rounds tracked by Value Add VC, each tied to the source we covered it from. It is useful for the question the market totals can't answer (which specific companies raised, how much, and who says so), and useless for the question this piece is about. We never present it as a market total, add it to one, or compare it with the tracker figures above.

The biggest rounds tracked by Value Add VC in Q3 2026 (our store only), each with its own source — not a ranking of the quarter's biggest deals market-wide:

• Databricks, $5B (Aug 13, led by Coatue Management)
• Crusoe, $3.9B Series F (Sep 17)
• The Boring Company, $3B Series D (Sep 10)
• Cognition, $2B Series E (Sep 8)
• Joulent, $1.75B strategic investment (Jul 1, National Grid Ventures)
• Atoms, $1.7B Series A (Jul 22)
• Fireworks AI, $1.5B Series D (Jul 16)
• Fluidstack, $1.5B (Sep 3, Jane Street lead) — reported by Forbes and Crunchbase News (Sep 4); not a company announcement or filing
• Hadrian, $1.37B Series D (Aug 6)

Where one of our tracked rounds disagrees with a tracker's figure, we show both numbers with their sources rather than picking one.