2025 VC Broke Records — and Concentrated Every Dollar

What the 2025 totals establish is not a rising tide but a narrowing channel. The NVCA 2026 Yearbook frames it as two markets stacked on top of each other: one defined by massive AI deployment, the other by mounting structural pressure on liquidity for everyone else. The 859 unicorns without viable exits are the cost of a market that rewarded concentration — the founders and funds outside the AI capital funnel absorbed a tightening, not a boom. That asymmetry is what the record obscures, and it is what the next…