The newly released Arkansas Venture Capital Ecosystem Review covers investment trends shaping the state’s venture ecosystem, spotlights opportunities as the COVID-19 crisis gives way to recovery, and reveals challenges for up-and-coming innovation hotspots such as Arkansas.

The investment data, collected from PitchBook, suggests that the Arkansas startup ecosystem has shown impressive growth and consistency moving into the new decade. The state has been posting elevated deal counts and total deal value over the past few years and was able to achieve comparable investment activity during the pandemic year. 2021 VC activity is currently on pace to surpass 2020 and potentially be the largest on record.

In just the first half of 2021, there have been 16 total deals with a cumulative $60 million in value. Which, at this pace, will easily exceed the investment and number of deals from last year. This Arkansas report comes after Innosphere released the VC reports which detailed the Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado venture capital ecosystems.