Venture industry tracker CB Insights this morning released a preliminary report on the fourth quarter of 2015, showing a downward trend in just about every startup funding metric imaginable.
Venture capital dollars were down, the first down quarter since the third quarter of 2013. So was VC deal volume--down to a level not seen since the beginning of 2013. Fewer new unicorns were crowned and mega-deals "plummeted" in the fourth quarter. Here are three charts that show what the beginning of the end of the tech bubble looks like.
Here are VC deals and dollars from Q4 2015 going back to Q1 2011. We haven't seen a dip like this in nearly two years.
$100-million-plus "mega-rounds" had been on a march upward through the first three quarters of 2015. That ended in the fourth quarter.
Unsurprisingly, given those two charts, VC at the same time slowed its birthing of new unicorns through astronomical up-rounds.
It's not a tech bubble unless you know it's a bubble, right?
