Venture investors hit the brakes on productivity software • TechCrunch

In the final days of the third quarter, it’s becoming clear that some areas of startup investment are losing luster. Declines are hardly surprising amid a more conservative venture capital market, a falling stock market, and global macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainty. Still, even with large caveats, the pace of change in certain startup sectors appears material.

One category of startup investment that proved rock solid quarter after quarter in recent years was business and productivity software, a cohort of companies that PitchBook groups under a single descriptor, allowing us to track it rather carefully. Data indicates that after a long period of strong venture interest, business/productivity software companies are seeing their allowance sharply docked.

Given the declines, we’re curious today whether the reductions to investment in this particular startup grouping will prove to be more severe than what the larger venture capital market posts in Q3.

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As always with venture capital data, we’re pulling present-day information from a living dataset, by which we mean that we are looking at preliminary data points; more information will flow into databases like PitchBook and competitors like CB Insights and Crunchbase as Q4 kicks off and final deals from the preceding period are collated.