AI Took Over 60% of Carta’s Q1 Funding. What About Everyone Else?

The scope matters. Carta is describing companies on its platform, not every venture deal in the United States or the world. Within that population, the data shows a striking concentration of capital in AI and an even more extreme premium for a small set of foundational-model companies.¹

The headline recovery contains two different markets

Carta says a Series A foundational-model startup in its Q1 2026 data was raising at a $300 million median valuation, compared with $55 million for a non-AI startup at the same stage. That is about 5.5 times higher. A single “Series A valuation” benchmark therefore hides very different markets.¹

That does not mean a founder can add “AI” to a pitch deck and receive a 5.5-times higher valuation. Medians describe groups of financings that differ in product, growth, capital needs and investor demand. The comparison shows market separation, not a pricing formula.

SaaS shows how concentrated the money became

Carta reports that 83% of capital raised by SaaS companies in its Q1 dataset went to AI startups. SaaS has historically been a major part of Carta’s private-market data, which makes that concentration especially revealing. It suggests that “software funding” and “AI software funding” were increasingly different experiences during the quarter.¹

The concentration was not created from nowhere in one quarter. Carta’s 2025 review had already found an AI valuation premium at every stage from Series A onward. At Series A, the median AI valuation was 38% higher than the non-AI median in 2025. By Q1 2026, the foundational-model subset was much more extreme.^{2, 1}

What does “everyone else” see?

If more than 60% of the capital in the dataset went to AI, less than 40% went to non-AI companies. That is a boundary, not an exact non-AI dollar figure, because Carta reports the AI share as “over 60%.” It also does not tell us that fewer than 40% of funded companies were non-AI. Capital share and company count are different measures.¹

The report also says down rounds fell to 11.4% and later-stage Series B and Series C primary pre-money valuations rose from the prior year. Those are signs of a broader market improvement. The point is that the improvement did not distribute capital evenly across sectors or company types.¹

The same market can feel hot and cold at once

That discipline matters when reading individual-company funding headlines too. Stripe’s employee tender is a private liquidity event, not a conventional fundraising round. Figma’s IPO mixes company capital with shareholder liquidity. The word “money” covers very different transactions.

The Q1 2026 story is therefore not simply that venture capital recovered. It is that the recovery became highly concentrated in AI, and within AI, a small group of foundational-model companies operated on a different financial scale. Founders outside that pocket were participating in the same market cycle without necessarily experiencing the same market.