Big checks, few bets: Seattle startup count drops to lowest level since 2020
Seattle-area startups attracted nearly $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 number of deals has been at its lowest since mid-2020, continuing the trend of venture capital focusing on fewer, larger rounds, with a disproportionate share of funding going to promising small startups, most of them using artificial intelligence.
By comparison, the Seattle region’s deal value was $2.2 billion among more than 100 deals in the first quarter of 2025, last year. At its peak in early 2022, the region saw 152 deals in one quarter – more than double the latest figure.
It’s a pattern that plays out nationally as well. US startups raised $267 billion in Q1, more than double the previous record, but five deals — including rounds for OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI — accounted for nearly three-quarters of that amount.
“VC has entered an era of consensus deals, and that dynamic will continue,” noted the authors of the PitchBook-NVCA report, released Wednesday morning. “In every category and chain, a small percentage of companies significantly outperform the others.”
The risk is that fundraising from shrinking companies could leave a large portion of startup ecosystem starved of funding as headline numbers look healthy.
Levels: According to the report, the Seattle area ranked seventh in the country in the quarter for the amount of money raised, and 10th for the number of deals.
The region generally ranked No. 6 to No. 8 on both measures from 2017 to 2020, but has dropped in various places on different metrics in recent years. Austin, for example, has surpassed Seattle in the number of deals and Miami has surpassed it in the number of deals.
Space highlights: One bright spot is the space startup. Stoke Space in Kent raised $350 million, Starcloud in Redmond raised $170 million, and Portal Space Systems in Bothell closed more than $61 million, according to PitchBook, including a recently reported $50 million round.
That’s a combined $580 million from a collection of companies that build rockets, orbital data centers, and space shuttle systems in areas south and east of Seattle.
AI and infrastructure: Other big deals in the first quarter include a $300 million Series D for Temporal, a Bellevue-based infrastructure startup, and a $100 million for Seattle-based Overland AI to scale its autonomous military vehicles.
Seven of the 10 largest Seattle deals in Q1 have AI tags, reflecting a national trend where 88.8% of all US deals went to AI companies, according to PitchBook.
Other notable rounds include $60 million in seed funding for Entire, a developer platform launched by former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, who is based in the Seattle area.
What is Seattle, anyway? Xbow, an independent cybersecurity company founded by GitHub Copilot co-founder Oege de Moor, has raised $120 million in a Series C round valued at more than $1 billion.
Xbow lists Seattle as its headquarters, but its address is a post office box in the Pioneer Square co-working space, and its nearly 200 employees are spread around the world — one of the realities of the far-from-first era, and a reminder that the designation of HQ doesn’t always indicate a meaningful geographic presence.
Look GeekWire’s funding tracker for the latest deals in the Pacific Northwest.
