News Summary

• In Q1 2026, private markets went into overdrive while the exit window stayed selective.
• Investors poured about $300 billion into roughly 6,000 startups globally in the quarter.
• “AI is driving this whole venture investment cycle.
• So it’s completely dominated,” Gené Teare, research lead at Crunchbase, told Fortune.
• The market is “between two worlds”: highly valued SaaS-era unicorns that can’t convincingly prove AI-driven growth, and “new native AI companies” posting huge early numbers but still too early and volatile for the public markets.