Venture capital, recovery for exits but 2021 peaks still far off

In 2025, the US venture capital fund billion-dollar exit market is showing signs of a gradual but not yet structural recovery, according to historical trends reported by Crunchbase data. After the vertical collapse since 2022, when billionaire deals plummeted from the peaks of 2021 (with more than 70 in a single quarter) to single-digit numbers, this year appears to be the year of normalisation and not so much of the trend reversal expected by the industry.

In 2023 and 2024, the exit market remained at historic lows, fluctuating between 2 and 9 billion transactions per quarter, reflecting a macro environment dominated by high inflation, restrictive interest rates and a virtually closed IPO window.

Figures for 2025 show a tentative return of confidence, but in a market that remains largely reflexive: in the first quarter, there were 12 disposals over one billion, rising in the second quarter to 18, touching the highest since the first quarter of 2022, and then returning to 13 in the third quarter. Adding to the total of 43 deals are the six deals recorded in the current fourth quarter. Almost 50 deals, however, are a far cry from the 2021 peak of 211.

Driving the transactions has been the reopening of the listing market, the consolidation of mature sectors to the extent that many exits are taking place through strategic M&s, especially in applied AI, cybersecurity, infrastructure fintech, and especially healthtech. A market with more realistic valuations has also helped the upswing: corporations are acquiring technology and market share at more reasonable prices than in the 2020-2021 period.

Looking deeper into 2025, the ranking of the largest venture capital divestment deals in the US highlights where the value generated by innovation is being concentrated. Wiz leads the ranking of the most valuable deals with a record exit worth $32 billion, confirming cybersecurity as one of the most robust and sought-after sectors amid global technology consolidation. Following, but at a distance, is CoreWeave, valued at USD 23 billion, driven by demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure and the race for data centres, now among the most sought-after assets by corporate and institutional investors. In third place Figma, which with a 19 billion exit continues to be one of the success stories in collaborative design software, benefiting from the increasing integration of AI in creative tools. Also in the top five are Chime (fintech, $9.8bn) and Clario (biotech, $8.9bn), two deals that testify to the resilience of the two reference sectors: on the one hand, digital financial services, which have returned to appeal after the post-2021 downturn, and on the other, biotechnology, which remains one of the few areas capable of generating significant exits even in the most complex market cycles.