Although Oura has postponed its planned offering that could have raised as much as $2.2 billion, Anthropic is still making a move toward the public markets along with AI cloud provider Nscale and other companies lining up potential fourth-quarter listings.
Austin-based Tiny Health has raised $33 million in a Series B funding round led by B Capital to help it meet growing demand for its at-home microbiome tests.
In an interview with Crunchbase News, Sandhya Venkatachalam, founder and managing partner of Axiom Partners, discusses why she looks beyond familiar founder profiles, what makes an AI company durable, and how an early investment in Groq shaped her approach.
This week delivered a bountiful supply of big startup funding rounds, led by two $400 million financings for cybersecurity unicorns and large financings for startups across hot sectors, including foundational AI, drug discovery, neurotech, and even rainmaking.
From January through August, U.S. tech layoffs reached at least 94,046, up 16.8% from 80,486 in the same period of 2025. Interestingly, and unsurprisingly, many of the cuts came as tech companies redirected spending toward AI and restructured operations to reduce costs.
Dextr AI is emerging from stealth with $6.7 million in seed funding to build agents that handle reservations, guest requests, staff coordination and other hotel tasks.
So far this year, companies in the gaming space have raised around $2 billion in seed- through growth-stage funding. That's already ahead of the 2025 full-year total, driven in large part by big rounds for companies at the intersection of AI and gaming.
So far this year, global startups have secured at least 114 Series A rounds of $100 million or more, per Crunchbase data. That’s the highest annual total in years and on track to top the all-time peak. We take a look at where the money is going.
As AI agents gain access to enterprise data, systems and tools, they are emerging as a new class of active identity requiring specialized permissions, monitoring and governance, writes guest author Itay Sagie. He believes the market, and its M&A opportunities, will likely form around specific control points, making precise positioning crucial for startups.
Baselayer, an AI-powered startup that helps financial institutions verify businesses and assess fraud risk, has raised a $35 million M13-led Series A to expand its identity technology to AI agents.
In an interview with Crunchbase News, Van Espahbodi, general parter at Generational Partners, discusses how AI is changing hardware economics, why software investors are rushing into industrial technology, and what he believes many of them misunderstand about the sector.
After a week of multiple billion-dollar-plus rounds, startup investors have reduced the number of zeroes on their funding checks. This past week, the largest U.S. startup funding rounds were in the hundreds of millions, topped by a $550 million financing for AI infrastructure company Temporal Technologies and a $308 million investment in space vehicle developer Impulse Space.
The most-fundable startups prioritize a clear go-to-market strategy and test distinctive marketing channels early, treating distribution and disciplined focus as durable competitive advantages, explains guest author Aaron Golbin, a co-founder and general partner at LvlUp Ventures, who believes that seed-stage success depends on focused execution, diversified financing, built-in distribution, rapid learning and AI designed as core infrastructure.
Newly launched Skalar provides startups with capital to fund sales and marketing initiatives in a fairly straightforward, though somewhat unusual model which lets the startups pay it back out of the revenue generated by the customers acquired with that capital.
From putting nuclear reactors on barges to grading how well AI models can control robots, this month’s crop of interesting startup deals takes AI and other emerging technologies well beyond the conventional software stack.
U.S. venture-backed technology companies have secured around $90 billion in domestic public offerings this year, per Crunchbase data. That’s already the second-highest annual tally on record, and we’ve still got a few months to go.
AI startups are reaching massive valuations and liquidity events so quickly that young founders and employees often acquire life-changing wealth before they are prepared to manage it. Ron Honig of From-Honig Family Office, advises that the company's financial plans should remain flexible, balancing long-term security with future opportunities.
Startups across sales, marketing and customer management have raised $7.5 billion so far this year, according to Crunchbase data. The largest rounds span everything from advertising and customer data to sales software, e-commerce and customer support — reflecting just how many companies are still trying to build a better way to market and sell.
We ranked August’s most active startup investors across several categories, including lead backers, prolific venture dealmakers, highest spenders and seed investors, which were once again dominated by familiar names.
The standard four-year founder vesting schedule can leave departed founders with large equity stakes, complicating financing and control, and prompting costly litigation aimed at reclaiming shares. Guest author David Siegel, a partner at Grellas Shah LLP, shares ways startups can reduce these risks.
It was a monster week for U.S. startup funding, with four companies each raising $1 billion or more. The Boring Co. led with a $3 billion Series D, followed by AI coding startup Cognition at $2 billion. Joining them near the top was fleet management software provider Motive, which landed $1.3 billion, while reusable rocket developer Stoke Space raised another $1 billion.
AI itself is no longer a durable differentiator, argues guest author SC Moatti of Mighty Capital, who says he strongest startup moats are counter-positioning and network economies.
Iman Abuzeid left clinical medicine to tackle healthcare problems at scale, co-founding Incredible Health, a hiring platform that reverses traditional recruiting by having employers apply to healthcare professionals by combining her expertise with co-founder Rome Portlock’s technical skills the company uses AI agents to cut hiring time by 30%.
Guest author Alberto Onetti, chairman of Mind the Bridge, shares how South Korea’s rise to the world’s eighth-largest national innovation ecosystem shows how sustained government investment, startup programs, regulatory reforms and deep-tech policies can transform an economy over time.
A total of 29 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in August, adding around $63 billion in value to the board. More than a third of the companies to join last month were under 3 years old, underscoring how quickly some of today's best-funded startups are reaching multibillion-dollar valuations.
In an interview with Crunchbase News, Sean Jacobsohn, a partner at venture firm Norwest, discusses where he still sees openings in the crowded market for finance software, how far companies should trust AI with accounting work, why HR startups may be better off attacking the secondary products of large platforms, and why he tests a CEO's sales ability before investing.
Paris-based generative AI startup Mistral AI said Tuesday that it has nearly doubled its valuation to more than $24 billion with a Samsung Electronics-led $3.5 billion Series D fundraise.
AI infrastructure dominated the largest venture rounds this week, with two multibillion-dollar deals in the sector taking the top spots. Data center and cloud provider Crusoe led with a massive $3 billion financing, followed by Fluidstack’s $1.5 billion raise.
After nearly two decades working as a lawyer at companies such as Amazon, Cruise, Replit and Anki, Cecilia Ziniti teamed up with engineer Bardia Pourvakil to combine their knowledge of law and coding to co-found GC AI.
Venture investors poured $42 billion into just over 1,500 startups worldwide in August, Crunchbase data shows, down 25% from July’s $56 billion but still up a significant 122% compared to last August, which is typically a slower month for startup investment.
Lyte, a physical AI startup building sensing and perception technology for robots, has raised a Maverick Silicon-led $165 million Series C funding at a $1.6 billion post-money valuation.
In the first half of this year, 58 venture-backed companies joined the public listings at $1 billion or above, per Crunchbase data. With the year’s end now in sight, a small window remains for other startups to launch 2026 IPOs, so we took a look at notable venture-backed startups that Crunchbase’s predictive intelligence suggests are potential IPO candidates within the next six months.
Félix, a Miami-based AI-powered WhatsApp remittance platform for Latino immigrants, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $200 million in Series C funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst.
Real estate tech startup investors are being more selective about their bets and putting more money into companies using AI and other technology to make construction, property operations and real estate transactions faster and less expensive.
While the AI boom has disrupted funding patterns across the startup sphere, biotech has remained a rare steady sector for investment. For the past few years, global funding to biotech startups has hovered between $36 billion and $40 billion. Per Crunchbase data, 2026 is on track to stay close to that range.
So far this year, a record $20.3 billion in global seed- through growth-stage funding has gone to companies in space- and satellite-related sectors, per Crunchbase data. That’s already by far the highest annual tally on record, and we’ve still got four months left in 2026.
Identity verification and fraud prevention company Socure announced Thursday that it raised $156 million in a strategic growth investment valuing it at $5.2 billion. The Incline Village, Nevada-based company also says it is acquiring agentic AI startup Fravity, which will be incorporated into its RiskOS platform as RiskOS_Agents.
In the fourth of a series of articles about non-tech founders getting venture funding, we talk to Craft CEO Ilya Levtov, a Julliard-trained cellist who says he was able to launch his supply chain intelligence software company despite having never written a single line of code.
In the past two years, venture investors have poured more than $7 billion into legal and legal tech startups, most with an AI focus. Funding to the space hit a record level last year, with $4.6 billion invested, per Crunchbase data. So far this year, legal tech startups have pulled in more than $2.2 billion.
The market for private-company shares has become a much bigger part of the startup ecosystem. In this Crunchbase News Q&A, EquityZen co-founder Phil Haslett discusses why startups are offering employees and investors liquidity earlier, and why secondary prices can be more revealing than headline valuations.
The traditional VC model funds a risky search for product-market fit, argues guest author Richard de Silva of Lateral Investment Management, while bootstrapped founders typically start with known customer problems, prioritize profitability and grow steadily from revenue rather than outside capital.
Amid fierce competition for an edge in the AI race, well-funded startups commonly find it’s simply faster to buy another company than try to build out certain technologies themselves.
The biggest financing of the week went to Castelion, a defense tech startup developing a hypersonic missile. Other sizable rounds went to companies developing AI inference technology, a video-creation platform, data centers and voice-to-text tools.
This month’s installment of this column is all AI, though applications for the technology range widely, from two startups that apply AI to trash or recycling, to another that promises to help people breathe and sleep better, to a company that says its AI can help architects and builders spot commercial projects before they’re even announced.
Our third in a series of articles about non-tech founders getting venture funding features Tabs founder Ali Hussain, who started the AI fintech after realizing pursuing a Ph.D. in humanities was a terrible idea and spent some time in the tech workforce where he learned a few things about building venture-backed companies.
The best boards continuously evaluate selling alongside scaling, pivoting, or staying independent, especially when the company is thriving, founder priorities are shifting, or strategic buyers begin showing interest, argues tech strategic adviser Itay Sagie. In this guest commentary, he share three signals that tell directors that it’s time to sell the company.
So far this year, 250 companies have joined the unicorn ranks through Aug. 15, up from 2025's 193 companies. Leading sectors included robotics, AI labs, healthcare and biotech, financial services, AI infrastructure, and AI deployment, among others. But which investors are winning the 2026 funding surge? We take a look.
In the first half of 2026, global venture funding in the physical AI space totaled $47.4 billion across 521 deals, per Crunchbase data. That’s up dramatically — almost 4x — compared to the second half of 2025 when startups in the sector raised $12 billion across 470 deals.
Massive AI spending has helped push earnings and valuations for semiconductor industry leaders to record levels, prompting the sector's giants to invest record sums in artificial intelligence and robotics startups.
Databricks is back raising another $5 billion, after it raised that amount just eight months ago. The largest fundings this week also went to an AI neolab, data center and electricity storage, defense, coding and biotech. Let’s take a look.
The sectors leading the herd to the Unicorn Board in July, by count, were financial services, robotics, AI orchestration, multimodal AI, energy and semiconductors, with the U.S. adding nearly half of the month's newly minted unicorns.
Our second in a series of articles about non-tech founders getting venture funding features Sarah Buchner, a "blue-collar worker by background" who set out to find a way to help construction companies manage their projects more efficiently using AI agents.
Austin-based ClearJet, an AI-enabled logistics technology startup connects shippers with unused cargo capacity on commercial flights, has raised a $25 million Edison Partners-led Series B, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
Venture investors seem to be more upbeat than they have been in years about the future of fitness and wellness. Startup investment in those categories totaled more than $3.6 billion in the first half of this year, putting 2026 on pace to come in about a third higher than 2025.
Monashees, one of Latin America's oldest and most influential VC firms, believes the next phase of the region's startup ecosystem requires a permanent Silicon Valley presence, opening a San Francisco office last year. We spoke with firm partner Fabiola Quinzaños to talk through the firm's evolution and how it is meeting this AI moment.
Companies unlock AI’s biggest productivity gains not by adding AI tools to existing workflows, but by redesigning teams, roles and daily work around AI. The broader lesson, argues Bob Morse, co-founder and managing partner of Strattam Capital, is that achieving transformational gains like 3x productivity requires CEO- and board-backed organizational change — not merely technology adoption.
A total 195 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in the first half of 2026 — far surpassing counts seen since the second half of 2022. Already, H1 is above the new unicorn totals for all of 2025, when 193 companies were minted with that status.
A wave of major AI IPOs could return significant liquidity to limited partners, fueling a new venture fundraising cycle rather than simply affecting public-market valuations. That capital is likely to flow disproportionately to the largest, established VC firms, writes guest author Andrew Gershfeld of Flint Capital, creating a concentration flywheel that could reshape fundraising, startup financing and power across the venture ecosystem.
Startups raised funding rounds with a lot of zeroes at the end this week, with three companies securing financings of $1 billion or more. Additionally, a robust lineup of companies in sectors including AI, e-commerce, cybersecurity, biotech and even mining also announced sizable new rounds.
Active startup investors kept up the pace in July, with familiar names topping the ranks in several metrics including most prolific venture dealmakers, most active lead backers, biggest spenders and highest-volume seed investors.
We analyzed a dataset of repeat founders who have gone through Y Combinator’s cohorts and found some very interesting insights. The dataset, shared with us directly from YC, consisted of 454 repeat founders through the program as well as 935 founder-company records spanning 2005 through 2026. We spoke to a couple of them about their experiences.
Founded by an educator fascinated by the educational potential of ChatGPT, MagicSchool AI leads off a series of articles featuring startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies.
While integrating AI into a startup's product strategy is often viewed as a way to enhance valuation, it can inadvertently reduce exit value, argues tech strategic adviser Itay Sagie. In this guest commentary he shares three ways your AI strategy can provide a positive impact on valuation when it becomes time for an exit.
Global venture funding showed no signs of slowing in July. Startup capital totaled $65 billion, up 100% year over year, as the month notched the highest-ever number of billion-dollar venture rounds on record, per Crunchbase data.
Traditional research on CEO career paths tends to focus on titles such as COO, CFO and divisional president. But the skills developed in product management may be just as relevant, argues Paysend CEO Ben Chisell. In this guest column, he makes the case that aspiring leaders should focus less on collecting prestigious titles and more on taking ownership of measurable business outcomes.
We speak with Menlo Ventures' Matt Murphy about why AI is pushing the firm toward larger deals, what it has learned from its Anthropic relationship, and where he sees the next big opportunities.
Another week, another bevy of big rounds. The largest round was a reported $5 billion Nvidia-backed financing for foundational AI unicorn Safe Superintelligence, followed by a $1 billion investment in Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Amid soaring energy demand from AI data centers, Antora says it will use its new capital to speed up deployment of “large-scale” projects across the country.
Crunchbase News talks with former NEA partner Vanessa Larco about how she evaluates startups based on founder potential rather than initial ideas and how she looks for teams that leverage AI to make products dramatically faster, cheaper, or easier to use.
Centralize, an enterprise sales platform, emerges from stealth and shares exclusive news of its $15 million Series A funding round with Crunchbase News.
The biggest long-term gains from AI will not flow to heavyweight incumbents or many AI-native startups but to scrappy middle-market technology companies, the middleweights, argues Brad Bernstein, managing partner at FTV Capital. In this guest column he shares the five traits the best middleweight technology companies share.
Freehand has raised $75 million in Series B funding to scale autonomous AI agents that manage supply chain spend and back-office operations for enterprises.
Throne Science, a startup that makes an AI-powered toilet camera to track gut health and hydration, has raised $10 million in a Series A round led by Will Ventures, it told Crunchbase News exclusively. Emerson Collective, Workshop, LEAD VC, Salt VC, Accomplice, Moxxie Ventures, and several other investors also participated in the financing. The round […]
Startups at the intersection of AI and security have raised $855 million across more than 150 reported seed-stage rounds this year, per Crunchbase data.
Crunchbase News recently spoke with SE Ventures managing partner Amit Chaturvedy about how the company is backing startups building the technologies that underpin the AI economy — everything from data center infrastructure and grid resilience to robotics and industrial AI.
Startup investors poured capital into a varied lineup of large rounds this week, targeting sectors including physical AI, biotech, cybersecurity, AI infrastructure and fintech.
For the first time in several quarters, General Catalyst in Q2 overtook Y Combinator when it came to participating in the most fintech deals of $5 million or more, per Crunchbase data. The quarter also marked the busiest one for General Catalyst since 2021 in terms of investing in rounds of $5 million or above.
Engineering leaders should build highly adaptable, vendor-agnostic infrastructure instead of relying on expensive, unpredictable proprietary hyperscalers, advises guest columnist Sumeet Vaidya, who says the foundational flexibility allows enterprises to safely pair AI agents with human teams while seamlessly switching between top-tier and cost-free open-source models as the industry evolves.
So far this year, 60% of global startup funding across stages — around $320 billion — went to rounds of $1 billion or more, per Crunchbase data, with such rounds instrumental in pushing global funding for the first half of the year to record levels.
While cloud migration previously offered unmatched speed and cost efficiency, decision-makers now perceive localized systems as offering superior long-term security. In this guest commentary, strategic adviser Itay Sagie shares three trends he believes are pushing on-prem back into the limelight.
A total of 34 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in June, altogether adding more than $110 billion in value, with 10 of those companies AI labs, which were collectively valued at $65 billion. Other leading sectors with multiple companies were in robotics and AI infrastructure.
AI will fundamentally rewrite the global financial value chain, making marginal operating costs near-zero and creating highly personalized, previously impossible products, argues guest columnist Nigel Morris of QED Investors. He warns that success will depend on whether incumbent banks and fintechs are willing to self-cannibalize and rebuild their operations around this transformative technology.
While 2026 has shown encouraging signs, with Black-founded startups raising approximately $643 million by late May, the strongest quarter since mid-2022, the improvement was driven largely by a handful of unusually large financings. James Norman and Sean Green, co-founders of Black Operator Ventures share their thoughts on how Black founders can close the Series A gap.
In this interview with Crunchbase News, Daniel Docter, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital, discusses how AI is reshaping SaaS and why he doesn’t believe the business model is headed for extinction, why he thinks distribution may ultimately separate the winners from the losers among AI startups, and more.
Mexico’s startups led the LatAm pack in Q2 — by a wide margin. The country’s startups raised $944 million in the second quarter, up 131% compared to $409 million in last year’s Q2, and up 136% from the $401 million raised in this year’s first quarter, per Crunchbase data. For comparison’s sake, that’s almost as much as Latin American startups as a whole raised in the second quarter of 2025.
It was not a holiday week on the funding front, as a raft of largely AI-focused companies closed big rounds. The largest of these was a $1.5 billion financing to enterprise AI startup Fireworks AI, and a Series D for meal and delivery provider Wonder.
We put together a snapshot of recent startup funding tallies and trends for World Cup finalists Spain and Argentina. While neither accounts for a particularly large share of global or even regional investment, both have an intriguing pipeline of recently funded companies. Here's what we found.
Despite attention-grabbing AI mega-seed rounds, historical data shows that very large first financings rarely produce venture-scale returns because high entry valuations limit investor upside. Instead, argues guest author Ellie McDonald, the strongest venture outcomes have typically come from capital-efficient startups that raised modest early rounds.
Overall, investors poured $42.8 billion into startup funding rounds across all of Asia in Q2 2026, per Crunchbase data. Led by China's $7.4 billion DeepSeek raise, that’s by far the highest quarterly total in more than three years.
Payments giant Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have teamed up to make an offer to buy troubled PayPal in a deal valued at more than $53 billion, Reuters reported Wednesday.
Venture funding into fintech startups climbed nearly 23% year over year in H1 2026, even as deal count fell more than 25%, Crunchbase data shows, a sign that investors are writing fewer, but much larger checks into the sector as they focus on areas such as wealth management, financial infrastructure and enterprise automation. We take a look at the numbers.
The wind-downs at PayPal and Fidelity International may look like a retreat, but the data points to a concentration of power at the top of the market that smaller funds will feel first, writes guest author Steve Brotman of Alpha Partners.
The first quarter of 2026 was a more robust period for funding than the second, with privacy and cybersecurity startups pulling in $4.4 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing in Q2. That marked a decline of around 30% from the prior quarter and year-ago levels.
To understand how institutional capital is navigating the gap between AI's public market software multiples and private market valuations, Crunchbase News recently interviewed Anders Ranum, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, who shared how he strikes an investment balance.
AI once again dominated venture funding this week, claiming five of the 10 largest announced rounds, including a pair of billion-dollar financings for AI infrastructure and cybersecurity that led the pack.
The five most intriguing startup deals from the past month include one that’s simultaneously developing AI models for biology, a company that wants to prevent modern day private markets from the kind of paperwork crisis that shut down Wall Street in the ‘60s, and AI agents that can dispatch plumbers and electricians to your door.
In Q2, Europe posted its strongest quarter in four years for venture funding, Crunchbase data shows. All told, Europe-based startups raised $24 billion in the just-ended quarter, up around a third quarter over quarter and two-thirds higher than the $14.4 billion raised in Q2 2025.
Los Angeles-based startup EdVisorly tells Crunchbase News exclusively that it has secured a $13.3 million Series A funding round to scale its AI-native platform, which automates the manual back-office workflows that can slow down university admissions.
