A few thousand startup investors sit down to some Zoom meetings. Six months later, they’ve written checks worth $155 billion, minted 161 new unicorns, and watched five of their most valuable portfolio companies go public at a collective valuation of $190 billion.

There’s no punchline here. Those are simply the tallies for North American startup investment in the first half of this year, per Crunchbase data. They’re very large numbers and record-setting investment totals, well above the prior all-time highs set just months earlier. READ MORE