State of Emerging Fund Formation

The one-sentence version: new fund formation rose for the fourth straight quarter to its highest level in the two years we track, and nearly all of it is happening below $100M.

Q2 2026: The Formation Wave Keeps Building

5,844 pooled investment funds filed an original Form D in Q2 2026 — up 7.2% from Q1’s 5,449 and up 49% from the same quarter a year earlier (3,911 in Q2 2025). The trend has been up and to the right since the Q2 2025 dip: four consecutive quarterly increases, with each of the last four quarters setting a new high for the eight-quarter window. Venture capital funds are the largest single category, at 2,457 filings this quarter — 42% of all new pooled vehicles — followed by private equity, other investment funds, and hedge funds (15,813, 10,694, 8,093, and 3,381 filings respectively across the full two-year window).

The growth is not evenly distributed across fund types. VC fund filings grew 52% over the eight quarters — from 1,613 to 2,457 — modestly outpacing the 52% growth in pooled filings overall. Whatever is driving the wave, venture vehicles are at the front of it. If you are one of the people behind these filings, our guide to starting a VC fund and fund documents walkthrough cover what comes before and after the Form D.

The Sub-$100M Story: Formation Is an Emerging-Manager Phenomenon

Among Q2 2026 filings that state a defined offering amount, 93% target less than $100M — and among VC funds specifically, 95.7%. That share has been remarkably stable across all eight quarters (never below 90.9% overall, never below 95.7% for VC), which means the two-year surge in fund formation is not large funds multiplying — it is thousands of additional small vehicles. In plain terms: essentially every incremental fund in this dataset is an emerging-manager-sized fund.

The size distribution is extremely skewed. The median pooled-fund target offering in Q2 2026 is $1.31M while the mean is $38.71M — a mean nearly 30× the median. A small number of very large vehicles pulls the average up, but the typical new fund is small enough that a first-time GP’s real competition is not Sequoia’s next flagship; it is the thousands of other sub-$100M vehicles forming every quarter. For what that operating reality costs, see our fund admin pricing benchmark and fund economics explainer.

Venture Funds: A $560K Median Says Micro-Vehicles Dominate

The median venture capital fund filing in Q2 2026 targets just $560K. That is not a typo, and it is the single most misread number in fund-formation data: the “Venture Capital Fund” box on Form D is checked by everything from a $500K single-deal SPV or series-LLC cell to a $500M institutional fund. A median in the half-million-dollar range means more than half of new “VC fund” filings are deal-sized vehicles — syndicate SPVs, angel collectives, first-close micro-funds — not blind-pool funds in the traditional sense. The mean of $20.19M tells the other half of the story: real funds are in the data too, they are just outnumbered.

The direction of the median is its own signal. It has risen from $341K in Q3 2024 to $560K — up 64%, with quarter-over-quarter increases in five of the last seven quarters. The typical new venture vehicle is still tiny, but it is getting steadily less tiny: the center of gravity is shifting from single-deal SPVs toward small committed funds. If that shift describes you, our SPV explainer covers the vehicle most of these filings represent, and the fund formation guide covers the step up.

Where New Funds File From

New York led Q2 2026 with 949 filings, followed by Delaware (909), California (688), Washington (680), and Florida (383). Two shifts stand out across the eight quarters. Delaware’s count has grown faster than any other top state — from 373 in Q3 2024 to 909 in Q2 2026, moving it from fourth place to a near-tie for first. And Florida displaced Texas in the top five starting in Q1 2026.

Read this table with one large caveat: Form D reports the issuer’s principal-place-of-business state, and for funds that is often a legal or administrative address rather than where the manager actually sits. Delaware’s rise, in particular, is best read as more vehicles being formed and administered at their Delaware domicile address — not as a migration of GPs to Wilmington. Washington’s persistent top-two presence across 2024-2025 likewise reflects where filings are addressed from, not necessarily where investing decisions happen. We report the field as filed and flag it rather than attempting to re-attribute filings to operating locations.

The Full Quarterly Series

Every quarter in the dataset. Medians and sub-$100M shares cover filings with a defined offering amount only. This table is exactly what the downloadable CSV contains.

What to Watch Next Quarter

Three questions the Q3 2026 edition will answer. First, does the streak extend to five quarters — Q2’s +7.2% was the smallest increase of the current run (16.4%, then 7.1%, 11.8%, 7.2%), so the wave may be cresting. Second, does the median VC target offering hold above $500K — it has now printed above that level for two consecutive quarters, the clearest sign yet that small committed funds are gaining on single-deal vehicles. Third, does Delaware overtake New York for first place — the gap was 949 to 909 this quarter. The next edition publishes shortly after the quarter closes; the VC Beast newsletter carries it first.