The failure of Silicon Valley Bank did not stay contained. Signature Bank, a New York lender with heavy crypto exposure, was seized by regulators just two days after SVB. Weeks later, First Republic Bank — battered by deposit flight despite a $30 billion lifeline from a consortium of large banks — was closed and sold to JPMorgan Chase.

First Republic's collapse ranked as the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history by assets, trailing only Washington Mutual. Its wealthy, uninsured-heavy depositor base made it acutely vulnerable to the same run dynamics that felled SVB.

For startups, the episode reinforced a hard lesson from March: concentration risk in a single, tech-adjacent lender was now unacceptable. Treasury management became a board-level topic, and money flowed decisively toward the largest, most systemically protected institutions.