Thanks to a continued flush of huge funding rounds, venture capital flowing into U.S.-based companies rose 17 percent last year, to $71.9 billion.

The numbers, released early Wednesday by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and CB Insights’ in their quarterly MoneyTree Report, found that overall venture capital had a strong year in the U.S. Megarounds, meaning those of more than $100 million, set a new record, but small rounds fell.

The report noted that in 2017, there were 109 megarounds, beating the previous record of 107 in 2015. B smaller rounds dropped to 5,052, down 4 percent from 5,268 in 2016. Early-stage funding, in particular, dropped to a two-year low with just 22 percent of deals in the fourth quarter relating to seed rounds versus 30 percent or more in previous years.

“2017 closed strong because of megaround activity — a theme throughout the year,” Anand Sanwal, co-founder and chief executive officer of CB Insights, said in a statement. The record year for these megarounds was driven by what he called the “SoftBank Effect.” That’s the entry of large, deep-pocketed investors, ranging from SoftBank Group Corp., which raised $100 billion for its Vision Fund last year, to sovereign wealth funds.

But he also called out the pullback in early-stage activity and the decline in overall deal activity. “Deals are still being completed, especially the bigger ones, but the early-stage activity, which is vital to the VC ecosystem’s health, did take a hit,” he noted. “There is a lot of early-stage (seed capital) that has been raised, so it’s likely to bounce back.”

Although funding did increase in the U.S., other regions saw the largest surge in venture investments. VC funding in Asia jumped 117 percent, to $70.8 billion, nearly topping the U.S. figure, while funding in Europe grew 40 percent for the year, hitting a new record high of $17.6 billion.

Other notable takeaways from the report include the continued strength of investment into artificial intelligence, with funding in AI companies topping $1 billion in every quarter in 2017 and up a full 28 percent from 2016.

The MoneyTree figures come close to those from the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report released Tuesday. According to that report, the U.S. venture capital industry finished strong in 2017 with $84 billion invested in 8,035 companies across 8,076 deals. Although the figure is $12 billion higher than the MoneyTree figure, both agree that the numbers reflect a record year in venture capital.

“The fourth quarter bookended a busy year for the entrepreneurial ecosystem, marked by the largest amount of capital deployed to VC-backed companies since the dot-com era and a number of policy developments that will have lasting impacts on the ecosystem in 2018 and beyond,” Bobby Franklin, president and chief executive officer of NVCA, said in a statement. He called out “changing market dynamics for the industry, including large pools of committed capital, shifting deal sizes, rising valuations, record unicorn exits and strong investment into life science companies and other emerging breakthrough technologies.”

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