Everyone Is Buying the Same Ticket

Venture capital has one iron rule: to win big, you have to be right AND non-consensus. If everyone sees the same opportunity, the returns get competed away before the ink dries.

According to Decile Group's annual Venture Trends Survey — which tracks VCs inside and outside their program — for the first time ever, more than 50% of respondents named the exact same sector as the hottest investment category: artificial intelligence. Decile Group noted they have never seen this level of consensus in the survey's history.

In an industry built on contrarian thinking, half the room is raising the same hand.

The Numbers Behind the Frenzy

It's not just Decile Group's survey. According to data cited on LinkedIn by investor Bo-Liang Lu, sourced from HSBC Innovation Banking and Dealroom, AI represented 30% of all VC funding secured by British companies in the first half of 2025. In the same dataset, AI and Machine Learning combined with Deep Tech and Robotics captured 43.7% of trend votes in VC Lab's own survey.

That's nearly half the venture capital attention on earth pointing at one category.

In London. In San Francisco. In Athens. Same direction.

VCs Admit It — While Celebrating It

At TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in Athens in late May 2026, three prominent VCs — Niko Bonatsos of Verdict Capital, Andreas Stavropoulos of Threshold Ventures, and Ben Blume of Atomico — laid out their thinking on AI's moment.

Stavropoulos compared the current environment to the Google IPO era, calling it "an enabling event" that would bring a new generation of entrepreneurs into the market. Blume called the coming wave of mega-IPOs — including SpaceX reportedly targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation — "phenomenal" wealth generators that feed the next cycle.

Bonatsos name-dropped Cursor, a company his co-founder was the first-ever investor in, which Elon Musk has apparently been offered the option to acquire for $60 billion, according to TechCrunch's reporting.

All three were bullish. All three were enthusiastic. None pushed back hard on whether the consensus itself was the problem.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

The cheerleading coverage leaves out a crucial tension: the VC community is simultaneously celebrating the AI boom and quietly acknowledging it has the hallmarks of a groupthink trap.

Decile Group — not a doom-and-gloom publication, literally a platform that helps VCs build and scale their firms — put it plainly: when this many investors agree on the same direction, "there is a lack of thought diversity across the sector, and the early signs of groupthink."

They raised a question that nobody in the mainstream AI hype cycle wants to answer: Is AI itself driving the convergence in VC thinking?

Their argument is direct. As more investors use AI tools to research deals, generate insight, and shape strategy, those investors risk having their thinking shaped by the same underlying systems. Associates used to do this work — different people, different schools, different blind spots. Now it's the same platforms, same outputs, same conclusions.

That concern comes directly from Decile Group's own team raising it about their own industry.

FOMO vs. Groupthink — They're NOT the Same Thing

Bo-Liang Lu's LinkedIn post, drawing on both VC Lab research and a Harvard Business Review analysis of VC decision-making, makes a useful distinction mainstream coverage collapses entirely.

FOMO is individual. You, personally, are afraid of missing out.

Groupthink is collective. The group aligns, stops questioning, and dissenting voices get drowned out.

FOMO can become groupthink when enough individual fears pile up into a herd. HBR's own research, cited by Lu, makes the point plainly: the best VC outcomes are rarely unanimous. If every smart fund independently lands on AI, is that validation — or just market echo?

Nobody has a clean answer. But the question matters far more than the AI-boosting coverage suggests.

What the Age Joke Reveals

One of the VCs at the StrictlyVC Athens panel said — half-kiddingly, according to TechCrunch — that if you're 22 years old in San Francisco building something in AI, you might have a seed term sheet in your inbox. If you're 19, you might already have a Series A offer.

That's meant as a compliment to young founders, but it signals something else: capital is flowing so fast and with so little friction that age is apparently now a signal of quality. Younger equals hungrier equals fundable.

That's not disciplined investing. That's a mania with a pitch deck attached.

For Regular People

If you have money in any fund, pension, or retirement account that touches venture capital or tech — and in 2026, most Americans do through index funds — you are exposed to this.

The VCs celebrating the SpaceX IPO wave aren't wrong that liquidity events generate wealth. They're also correct that AI is transformative. But a once-in-a-generation technology and a once-in-a-generation bubble aren't mutually exclusive. The internet was both.

When more than half the smart money in the room is betting the same way, history says someone's holding the bag at the end. The question is whose retirement account it's sitting in.