Two King County space companies were among the top three organizations in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue area raising the most venture capital in the first quarter, according to figures released last week by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association.

Kent Rocket company Stoke Space Technologies took the top spot for the metro area, with a $350 million extension of its Series D financing. Redmond-based Starcloud, which is developing space-based data centers, was No. 3 with a $170 million Series A.

Their deals accounted for about 35% of the roughly $1.5 billion raised in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA in the first quarter in 67 deals. The MSA-wide quarterly count was just below the $1.6 billion raised in the fourth quarter and well below the $2.2 billion raised in first quarter 2025, data show.

At the No. 2 spot last quarter was Bellevue’s Temporal, an open-source platform powering what it says are the world’s most reliable agentic applications, with a $300 million Series D.

Rounding out the top five were Xbow of Seattle, $120.9 million, and Overland AI of Seattle, $100 million.

Others in the top 10 were Portal Space Systems of Bothell, Union.ai of Bellevue, Bellevue Lending of Bellevue, Avalanche Energy of Tukwila, and Mpathic of Bellevue.

Nationally, the first quarter saw $267.2 billion raised in 3,336 deals, let primary by five companies.

“Q1 2026 was one for the record books,” the Q1 2026 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor said in a market overview. “The $267.2 billion in quarterly deal value topped all full-year totals except for those of 2021 and 2025, and the $347.3 billion in exit value set a quarterly high, already placing 2026 as the second-highest year for exit value ever.”

Four deals exceeding $15 billion were completed, including OpenAI’s $122 billion financing, the Venture Monitor noted, adding that “xAI’s merger with SpaceX was the largest VC-backed exit of a U.S. company ever, though the narrative was muted because SpaceX is gearing up for an estimated $1.5 trillion-plus IPO later this year.”

Nizar Tarhuni, executive vice president of research and market intelligence at PitchBook, said in a statement, “Concentration has increasingly defined VC over the past couple years, but Q1 marked a new extreme. Capital is consolidating around a narrower set of perceived winners than ever before. Strip out the five largest transactions, and both deal and exit figures fall by more than 70%. Plus, 73% of LP commitments in Q1 went to just five firms. These are not the signals of a broad recovery — they’re the signals of a market where a shrinking group of players is setting the terms, and where record headlines are obscuring how little has changed for the rest of venture. Liquidity is still tight, the IPO window remains mostly closed, and founders and fund managers outside that top tier are navigating a market that looks very different than the numbers suggest.”