The global venture funding landscape marked a 53% year-over-year decline in the first quarter of 2023 reaching only $76 billion down from $162 billion in the first quarter of 2022 as venture investors in private companies continued to scale back their investment pace, according to a Crunchbase report.

This is despite the enormous $10 billion investment by Microsoft into OpenAI and a $6.5 billion round by payments giant Stripe – one of the largest funding to private venture-backed companies since 2019, before the pandemic. Without those two large deals, the Q1 venture funding landscape would have been down even more dramatically, close to $60 billion.