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CVCs are participating in a decade-low percentage of all venture deals as corporates grapple with how best to use their dollars in the new AI era.
As corporate investors navigate ballooning AI bills, many are also focusing on larger and more impactful deals to transform their own businesses. Big-dollar investments into AI startups are getting done at the C-suite level, not through venture arms, said Nagraj Kashyap, general partner at VC firm Touring Capital and the former global head of M12, Microsoft’s venture arm.
CVCs and corporates participated in just 21.1% of US venture deals in the first half of 2026—a decade low—according to the Q2 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. Yet they accounted for a record 82.6% of all deal value as they pile into later-stage VC rounds for in-demand AI startups.
While CVCs continue to invest in earlier-stage startups for returns, corporate development divisions acquiring or investing strategically in tech unicorns to advance their own businesses is what’s driving the deal value pop, Kashyap said.
“If I’m sitting at Amazon, or I’m sitting at one of these hyperscalers, I want these workloads on my cloud, not on somebody else’s cloud,” Kashyap said. “Frankly, the balance sheet growing is not the motivation.”
Companies, including Amazon, have been willing to invest multi-billion-dollar sums in AI startups to gain proprietary or preferred access to models and compute. Microsoft led the way with its initial OpenAI investment in 2019, making Azure the exclusive cloud provider for OpenAI at the time.
Publicly traded companies are warning investors of skyrocketing internal AI spend as compute and token costs climb with more advanced models. For instance, Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in the first four months of the year, then capped per-tool spending. Meanwhile, Meta killed off its “tokenmaxxing” leaderboard and capped token use company-wide.
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