Texas deployed 79.6 billion dollars across 284 deals in six months with an average check size three times larger than California's, and nobody's talking about it. Fort Worth is writing 710 million dollar average checks for mega-funds and continuation vehicles while San Francisco's deal count dropped 12 percent, and Dallas grew in both deal volume and size when that's not supposed to be possible. While coastal VCs fight over foundation model startups, Houston just funded 462 million into geothermal power infrastructure specifically for AI data centers because someone realized the model layer is commoditizing but energy infrastructure scales with usage.

Databricks just raised 4 billion dollars in three months—not for a moonshot, but for an enterprise data platform that added 600 million in new revenue in 60 days and is now worth 134 billion. While everyone debates which AI model will win, they're quietly becoming the operating system every AI company has to build on or burn cash trying to compete with. If your portfolio sits in the middle of the AI stack between mega-platforms and vertical apps, you just got put on a clock with a seven billion dollar budget ticking against you.

New York just deployed 562 billion dollars in venture capital last quarter but deal velocity dropped 8 percent while Massachusetts surged 17 percent and Connecticut jumped 15 percent in new deals. Turns out most of that New York money isn't backing the next Stripe, it's asset management funds and Wall Street vehicles moving money around, while the actual startup action is accelerating in Boston with shared AI infrastructure that gets companies to enterprise contracts three times faster. The biggest pile of cash and the most momentum are in completely different places right now, and only one of those strategies is gonna matter when these seed rounds turn into the next wave of billion-dollar companies.

Just 483 deals sucked up 69% of all Q4 capital—we're talking 1.5 trillion dollars flowing to the mega-deal market while everyone else fights over crumbs. One company, McCarthy Investment, closed a single 51.9 billion dollar transaction that represents more money than most venture funds will deploy in their entire 15-year existence. If your fund can't write nine-figure checks or you don't have hyper-specialized deal flow, you're not just losing—you're structurally locked out of where the actual money is going.

While VCs obsessed over AI mega-rounds in Q4, insurance quietly deployed 103.5 billion dollars across 78 deals, a 73 percent deal acceleration that made it the most aggressive capital deployment of the quarter. Insurance deals averaged 1.33 billion each, fifteen times larger than traditional tech deals, which actually contracted 22 percent to just 18 billion total. The twist: insurance became one of AI's biggest enterprise adopters with predictive underwriting and automated claims processing generating immediate ROI, meaning VCs chasing AI infrastructure completely missed the sector actually deploying it at scale.

AI startups pulled in $202 billion in 2025—literally half of all global venture funding—and the SEC categorizes it as "Other Technology" because there's no official AI classification. Two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, now represent 14% of the entire global venture market, which is nearly double the concentration we saw at the peak of the 2021 bubble. While most firms wait for official data that can't even distinguish AI infrastructure from e-commerce software, the ones winning are building proprietary tracking systems and seeing deals three to six months before they hit mainstream databases.

Less than 10% of deals captured 69% of all venture capital in Q4—483 mega-deals ate 1.5 trillion dollars while the middle market got absolutely crushed. The average deal size dropped 36 million dollars even as deal count went up, which means investors are doing more deals but writing way smaller checks everywhere except the top. If your portfolio company needs a Series B or C in that 100 to 250 million range, that capital just got brutally harder to access because the market is splitting into a barbell: mega-rounds at the top, seed rounds at the bottom, and a shrinking squeeze zone in the middle where companies are starting to suffocate.

Boston just deployed 137.8 billion in venture capital last quarter while San Francisco managed 57.3 billion, and somehow most VCs are still pretending the Bay Area runs the game. East Coast deals are now averaging 486 million versus West Coast's 253 million, with Boston's deal count surging 44.5 percent while SF crawled at 22.9 percent. The entire venture capital center of gravity has mathematically shifted east while everyone's still optimizing their portfolios for a San Francisco dominance that died three years ago.