CVCs are spending more on less

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.

Internal AI spend is only one factor at play, said Nicolas Sauvage, founder and president of TDK Ventures, which invests on behalf of TDK, a Tokyo-based electronics producer.

"I think this is a reset, but not necessarily a negative one," Sauvage said. "In the ZIRP era, there was too much capital, too much speed, and in some cases too little discipline. Some of the current slowdown may simply reflect fewer opportunistic participants. That is painful in the short term, but healthy for the category."

In this market, CVCs are prizing later-stage operators with a proven track record and business results, according to Anis Uzzaman, founder and CEO of Pegasus Tech Ventures , whose $2 billion firm manages VC funds each with a single corporate LP.

"They do not want to go for the shotgun approach, where they will fire and hit 100 different things, and one of them will be the crown jewel…our clients are taking more time, and that's why we're seeing a decline in the number of investments. But the amount they're investing per deal is increasing."

Still, there are anomalies. Coinbase Ventures made 60 investments this year, many of them early-stage. The CVC is on pace to match its 2025 cadence, in both deal count and dollars deployed, said Hoolie Tejwani, head of Coinbase Ventures.

Corporates also continue to weigh the build-versus-buy calculation for AI and are wary of backing too many startups now—cognizant that the asset class may be in a bubble, said Matt Saunders, managing partner of New Earth Ventures (NEV) , a corporate VC backed by Atlantic Packaging that is also raising outside capital.

"Corporates want to miss an AI bubble," Saunders said. "The way traditional CVCs invest, it does not include the diversification to allow for one major winner and a lot to fail, so the incentives for traditional CVCs are not lined up to invest in this type of environment. In the background, corporates are cost-pressured more than they ever have been."

Sinergia Empresarial continuará el seguimiento de esta información sobre cVCs are spending more on less y ampliará la cobertura conforme se confirmen nuevos elementos relevantes para el ecosistema empresarial.