(Photo by Flickr user, used via a Creative Commons license)

So, you just had a $5 billion venture capital year. Now what? With the final numbers for Q4 finally in, we can say with certainty that DC had a record-breaking year for investment across the board. To the tune of $4.9 billion, venture capital sang in 2021, with deals growing larger as the year went on.

For some scale, note that the DMV raised just under $2 billion in all of 2020, meaning it more than doubled its dollars in a year. It’s not alone in the bump, though. Nearby Baltimore had its best (albeit much smaller) year in recent history at $768 million and Philadelphia did, too, with a casual $8 billion raised.

Image: (Photo by Flickr user, used via a Creative Commons license)