In areas from consumer products to apps to gaming, U.S. venture firms have raised fresh capital to invest in industries where funding levels remain drastically below peak. This, along with a modest uptick in first-quarter venture investment, indicates some sectors may have hit a cyclical low last year and should be heading higher. To get a sense where newly allocated capital is going, we aggregated U.S. fundraising data for all new startup investment vehicles announced this year. We then looked at some of the sectors where investors plan to focus. To a large degree, they will continue to fund hot themes of recent quarters, and AI in particular. However, we also saw a number of funds targeting areas that might be considered more out of favor. Let's take a closer look. Against that backdrop, it's interesting to see that Andreessen Horowitz has earmarked $1 billion out of the firm's latest $7.2 billion fundraise to go toward an apps-focused fund. One expects AI will factor heavily into this strategy, given the firm's stated enthusiasm for AI-driven companionship, wellness and creativity tools....

AI commanded the attention of VCs last year, but while investors debated whether to bet on image-generation AI or medtech AI, several extremely consequential startup sectors ended up being overshadowed. Perhaps the most interesting field in startups right now is space exploration, with uses ranging from making space travel more accessible, to asteroid mining for rare metals ' including those needed for clean energy tech. Space hasn't always been a VC sweetheart due to huge upfront costs and high risk. But today, sending products into space is cheaper than ever through private companies like SpaceX. This allows new ventures to test out their technologies at (relatively) minimal cost. Space exploration offers untold opportunities to improve life on earth. Startups like Odyssey Spaceworks are launching science labs in Earth's orbit, seeking to accelerate areas like cancer research. Others are helping connect our world with satellite internet or vehicles that break the sound barrier. Many of these secondary applications can also bring in faster profits than traditional space exploration. But the full applications of such knowledge are so far unknown ' which is what makes this sector so explosive....

This year' Not so much. Venture funding overall is retreating amid public-market turmoil, record inflation and rising concerns about an economic recession. Even so, several startup sectors stand out'either for still outperforming, or for being particularly hard-hit by the venture pullback. During the height of the venture market last year, few sectors did as well as cybersecurity. The industry raised a record amount of venture capital and unicorns were minted on a seemingly weekly basis. Even this year, as the venture market has turned, cybersecurity has birthed more than a dozen new unicorns in the first six-plus months of the year. 'Anything that enables a company's digital transformation will continue to get funded,' said Alberto Yepez, co-founder and managing director at Forgepoint Capital, which specializes in cybersecurity and infrastructure software investments. Specific areas mentioned by multiple VCs at last week's RSA Conference in San Francisco included startups in the spaces of DevSecOps'where security is integrated into the software development process'cloud security and any tech around identity and authentication....

Moreover, the lineup of funded companies is mesmerizingly diverse, touching on spaces from virtual reality to mimic hallucinogenic mind trips to portable nuclear microreactors. To say that a single sector or handful of sectors dominate would be misleading indeed. That said, even amid all this abundant variety, a number of themes stood out. We looked at sectors including biotech, financial services, and real estate and picked out a few investment themes around which a lot of Series A deals seem to cluster. Here are five: Biotech is typically the sector where we see many of the biggest Series A rounds. In large part, this represents an acknowledgement by investors that developing groundbreaking therapies isn't something one can do cheaply. Among the largest 2022 Series A rounds, we saw a high number of companies working on treatments to stimulate the body's immune response. We put together a list of 17, which have collectively raised over $530 million in Series A funding this year: !function(e,i,n,s){var t="InfogramEmbeds",d=e.getElementsByTagName("script")[0];if(window[t]&&window[t].initialized)window[t].process&&window[t].process();else if(!e.getElementById(n)){var o=e.createElement("script");o.async=1,o.id=n,o.src="https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js",d.parentNode.insertBefore(o,d)}}(document,0,"infogram-async"); The largest funding recipient on our list is Seismic Therapeutic, a developer of machine-learning technology for immunology drug development, which raised $101 million in a February round. Other big Series A rounds went to Pheast Therapeutics, and Rondo Therapeutics, two immuno-oncology startups....