Global VC funding hit a two-year low in August

Like everyone’s desire to work, venture funding sunk to a new low during the dog days of summer.

In August, global venture funding fell to $25.2 billion, per Crunchbase, less than half of the ~$53 billion invested one year prior, and the lowest monthly venture-funding total in two years. It’s down ~10% from the previous month.

Even so…The ongoing pullback didn’t stop several companies—including Adam Neumann’s uh, controversial, comeback project Flow—from locking down significant investment rounds in August.

Here are three rounds that stood out to us…all of which happen to play in the clean-energy space:

• Terrapower, a nuclear tech developer founded by Bill Gates, raised $750 million. Gates co-led the round with SK Group, which plowed $250 million into the company. In addition to nuclear power generation, the company is also researching nuclear medicine techniques.
• Longroad Energy, a renewable energy developer based in Boston, raised $500 million. The company said that the funding will catalyze a shift toward an owned-and-operated business model and enable it to grow the capacity of its wind, solar, and storage assets from 1.5 gigawatts (GW) to 8.5 GW in the next five years.
• Lunar, a home-electrification startup founded by a former Tesla Energy exec, debuted with $300 million in funding, with residential solar bigwig Sunrun and SK Group (hello again) as investors. Later this year, Lunar plans to begin releasing hardware and software products that make it easier for homes to generate, use, and store carbon-free energy.

Zoom out: Monthly venture funding has been trending down since it hit a record high of $69.4 billion last November, as rising rates, inflation, and general economic uncertainty have turned the investing temperature from “deep summer” to “that first really cold day of winter where you neglect to wear a proper coat.”

But it’s time for two of our most common refrains on this subject: 1) $25 billion in monthly VC funding is still a lot of money and 2) VCs are sitting on a record-high more than half a trillion dollars in dry powder. Those reserves are unlikely to be emptied in 2022, but there is a lot of committed capital on hand for startups to vie for.