Venture capital's middle is vanishing

THE LAST TIME a young investor at a brand-name venture firm wanted to start their own shop, the path was punishing. Lawyers, fund administrators, compliance officers, an office, a part-time CFO — the operational tax of running a fund was nearly as forbidding as raising one. Today the back office can be rented from Carta for a few thousand dollars a month. Due diligence memos can be drafted by a language model in minutes. Portfolio construction is increasingly modeled by software like AngelList's Projector, which runs check-size and reserve scenarios that once required a dedicated analyst. The friction that kept ambitious juniors inside legacy firms has, at the operational level, largely dissolved.

The numbers reflect it. Solo general partners were a curiosity in 2020, the year the term was even coined; by 2024 they accounted for roughly 53% of all newly launched emerging venture funds. Data from Carta show that funds with between $1m and $10m in committed capital made up at least 40% of new funds closed on its platform in 2024 and the first half of 2025, up from 25% in 2020. The lineage of recent breakaways stretches from Elad Gil and former Sequoia partner Matt Miller to a fresher cohort: Rex Woodbury leaving Index Ventures to launch Daybreak, and Yuri Sagalov departing Y Combinator for Wayfinder. The AI era, which has compressed the cost of nearly every knowledge-work function, has compressed the cost of running a fund along with it. A single GP with the right tools can now run a process that, a decade ago, required a junior, an associate, and a CFO.

Yet the data tells a more complicated story.

Smaller, faster, alone

Even as solo funds proliferate at the bottom of the stack, capital is concentrating ferociously at the top. Andreessen Horowitz raised a little more than $15 billion in early 2026, a haul that, according to co-founder Ben Horowitz, represents over 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025. Lightspeed pulled in roughly $7 billion across six funds last year; Kleiner Perkins launched a $3.5 billion vehicle dedicated exclusively to AI. And yet, per PitchBook, only 1,117 venture funds closed globally in 2025, a sharp drop from the nearly 2,100 that debuted the year before. The barbell is real, the middle is hollowing, and the question is no longer whether the unbundling is happening — it is whether the talented junior contemplating the leap has correctly read which end of the dumbbell they belong on.