VC Emerging Opportunities 2025: Early-Stage Investment Attractiveness Across Technology Verticals (National Venture Capital Association (NVCA))

Summary

• AI is the largest of the 11 verticals with 8,933 early-stage companies, followed by SaaS with 5,476 and fintech with 2,852.p.5
• AI trailing 12-month early-stage deal value increased 23.7%, above the 17.5% cross-vertical average, while first-time VC financings rose 19.4% compared with a 19% decline across verticals.p.37
• Early-stage SaaS companies are expected to successfully exit at a 72.1% rate, a net 5.7 percentage points higher than the second-ranked vertical.p.8
• SaaS has the top annualized expected return at +4.6% relative to the cross-vertical average return of 21.2%.p.10
• Fintech led early-stage deal value growth with +31.7% over the trailing 12 months, while gaming fell 28.3% and agtech 26.7% relative to a 17.5% cross-vertical average.p.17
• Fintech first-time VC financing count rose 63.4% over the trailing 12 months, the largest gain among verticals.p.18
• AI accounted for 37.2% of total published patents across all verticals.p.20

Key insights

1. The VC Exit Predictor back-test of 2018 predictions against current estimated exit rates shows an R² of 0.62.p.14
2. Monte Carlo simulations (10,000 runs) suggest SaaS is expected to outperform with high confidence, while agtech, gaming, healthtech, and medtech are expected to underperform.p.11
3. Agtech VC funding peaked at $14.5 billion in 2021 and declined to roughly $6.6 billion in 2025.p.28
4. Climate tech VC deal value peaked at $59 billion in 2021 and reached $42.2 billion in 2025, essentially flat from 2024.p.46
5. Chips have the lowest expected returns in the AI vertical at -0.8%, reflecting a market dominated by NVIDIA and a few scaled incumbents.p.38