Private market returns: Our Private Capital Indexes track returns across active, closed-end funds, drawing on data representing $4.6 trillion in net asset value. View the Q1 report here.

Global snapshots: Our country-specific report series on public and private market trends returns for the UK, Spain, France, and the Netherlands.

Fintech focus: The machine economy is taking shape, but agents still can’t transact on their own—and that gap is where the next wave of fintech is being built. Read Machine Economy Rising: The Market of Limitless Cognition to learn about the market opportunity, and download our latest Fintech Report for a broader overview of the sector.

Corporate venture capital has become one of the most powerful forces in US AI startup funding, and it is increasingly concentrated.

A new PitchBook analyst note, Fewer Deals, Bigger Bets, finds that corporate investors accounted for a record 87.9% of US AI VC deal value in 2026 so far, even as they took part in a shrinking share of deals by count, at 18.2%, the lowest in our dataset. Within that total, a small set of large-ticket investors is driving a disproportionate share of the value.

The divergence, a rising share of value across a shrinking share of deals, points to a market where a handful of players write ever-larger checks into the most valuable AI companies. AI now makes up 93.6% of all corporate VC deal value, a decade high, as multibillion-dollar rounds for the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic pull corporate money toward the frontier.

The note maps these investors into distinct groups. Cloud hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google more often invest to secure model access and lock in cloud commitments, while enterprise and infrastructure names such as Salesforce, Cisco, Qualcomm and Intel tend to invest to embed AI in their own products. The frontier labs, for their part, increasingly use their own capital as a go-to-market strategy.

Standing apart is Nvidia, the single largest corporate investor by deal value, with a hand in $189.1 billion of US AI deals in 2026 YTD. It backs competing labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Mistral, with one aim: to keep the whole ecosystem dependent on GPU compute, regardless of which company or model ultimately prevails.

What comes next will be shaped by a few open questions: the durability of the mega-round dynamic as OpenAI and Anthropic move toward public markets, the path of a shrinking CVC population, and the conversion of today’s strategic bets into durable commercial relationships.

Dive into the full analysis here.

Private equity managers pitch themselves as transformational owners with arcane knowledge that turns leaden companies into gold. Their wisdom suggests they can deliver process efficiency, resource allocation, and economies of scale to boost EBITDA margins and generate alpha.

Yet as the industry’s most prominent names have raised ever-larger funds, their deal economics have changed as well. Billion-dollar buyouts target a different class of company. These firms already have lean operations and sophisticated management. The managers playing at this scale can’t just swoop in with the same old tricks.

Our latest analyst note, Diminishing Returns to Scale: Redefining PE as a Stratified Asset Class, leverages SPI by StepStone deal-level benchmarking data to break down how the largest buyouts are structured differently and create value from different sources than middle-market deals.

Global-scale managers ($6 billion-plus fund size) can attribute only 2% of enterprise value creation to EBITDA-margin expansion across all post-global financial crisis deals. Instead, these managers flex their scale to drive revenue for portfolio companies. Their strategy is less about individual deals and more about making thematic bets on macro themes, predicting where the market will be a few years from now.