Large U.S. venture deals this week were led by a massive defense tech raise for space security startup True Anomaly. We also saw sizable deals for startups applying AI to fintech, marketing, customer service, healthcare and developer tools.
In 2025, the Bay Area expanded its dominance of U.S. seed funding — capturing a growing share of both deals and dollars — even as most startups remained geographically dispersed, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows, resulting in a more bifurcated landscape.
Legora, an AI platform built for lawyers, has raised a $50 million extension from Nvidia’s venture arm, NVentures, reports CNBC. The raise brings the Swedish company’s recent Series D funding round total to $600 million. At the time of the first close in March, Legora was valued at $5.5 billion.
Since 2024, an estimated 207 AI-focused companies have joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board. That’s roughly half of all companies that first hit valuations of $1 billion or more during this period.
Dreambase, an AI-powered analytics platform that aims to help people build data-driven companies without hiring a data team, has raised $3.7 million in funding, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
More than half of seed dollars last year went into deals of $10 million or above. At the same time, deal counts for seed-stage startups have fallen since the 2021-2022 peak, as has funding going into rounds below $10 million, Crunchbase data shows.
Today, Japan’s unique fusion of obsessive individual creativity and precision engineering underpins both its global cultural dominance and technological strength, guest author Yuki Shirato points out, creating a rare opportunity the world is only beginning to recognize.
We recently spoke with Tiffany Luck, a partner at New Enterprise Associates about the increasing relevance of vertical AI, how startups can carve out durable advantages in a world dominated by platform giants, and more.
Kashable, a fintech that provides access to “socially responsible” credit and financial wellness programs for employees as a voluntary benefit, has secured $60 million in a Series C funding round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives’ Sustainable Investing.
This week, just half of the top 10 rounds crossed the $100 million mark, which is somewhat unusual in this high-flying era for venture megarounds. Nonetheless some large checks did get written, led by Amazon’s $5 billion investment and partnership deal with Anthropic.
S-1 filings have been plentiful the past few weeks for venture-backed startups providing semiconductors, nuclear and geothermal power, biotech, and space and defense tech queuing up for a possible trip to the public markets.
Cloneable, a startup that uses AI to shadow human experts in heavy industries such as energy and replicate their specialized workflows into autonomous agents, has raised $4.6 million in seed funding, the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
Funding to EV-related startups reflects a mix of optimism and restraint. While investors are backing big rounds for a handful of upstart brands, funding remains far below prior peaks and exit activity appears muted.
Los Angeles-based SimpleClosure has launched Asset Hub, a marketplace aimed at helping founders sell assets such as source code, data and equipment during the wind-down process. Crunchbase News spoke with founder Dori Yona about the new offering as closures rise and investors place greater value on “clean” shutdowns.
For startup founders, the opportunity today is to solve real problems by building vertical, AI-driven solutions in specific industries. MGV's Marc Schröder shares tips on successfully building a startup with an eye toward acquisition.
Schematic, a startup that aims to simplify pricing and packaging for software and AI companies, has raised $6.5 million in seed funding, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
Low prices can actually reduce demand, writes frequent guest author Itay Sagie, who shares how higher pricing is often a signal of quality, attracting more committed customers to position a company in a more competitive, higher-value market.
A total of 37 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in March, the highest monthly count in close to four years, Crunchbase data shows. The robotics sector led unicorn creation last month, with six new billion-dollar startups.
Eli Lilly announced Monday that it is acquiring Kelonia Therapeutics, a developer of gene therapies with a particular focus on cancer treatment, in a deal valued at up to $7 billion in cash.
This past quarter, funding to security- and privacy-focused startups dipped slightly on a sequential basis, but remained well above year-ago levels. Overall, investors put $4.9 billion into global companies in the space in Q1, per Crunchbase data, a comparatively solid performance relative to recent quarters.
The week’s largest round was a $650 million financing for electric pickup truck maker Slate Auto. Other sizable investments went to spaces including drug development, autonomous public transit and software engineering.
Several multibillion-dollar megadeals drove a spike in first-quarter investment in autonomous vehicles, signaling that investors aren't just paying for research, but betting on companies that are ready to scale up and put their AI technology into actual cars people can buy or hail.
In the first quarter of 2026, a handful of large, well-funded AI companies, almost all based in the U.S., captured the vast majority of venture dollars, even as global startup deal count fell, Crunchbase data shows.
Copenhagen-based Spektr, which uses AI to tackle the manual drudgery of financial compliance, raised $20 million in a Series A funding round, the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
Global venture funding to financial technology startups totaled $12 billion across 751 deals in 2026 as of April 6, per Crunchbase data. In terms of dollars invested, that’s up 5% year over year, but that money went into almost a third fewer deals.
Although the conventional wisdom in tech is that real ambition means staying independent, sometimes joining forces through an acquisition by a large, established company is what it takes to improve your mission's odds. Guest author Louis Blankemeier, co-founder and CEO of Cognita, explains how that process worked for his healthcare startup.
European venture funding reached $17.6 billion in Q1 2026, Crunchbase data shows. That’s up nearly 30% year over year and marks the second consecutive quarter of growth. The main driver was AI, which for the first time claimed more than 50% of the continent’s total funding for the quarter.
Overall, investors put $27.4 billion to work across seed- through growth-stage financings for Asian companies in Q1, per Crunchbase data. That’s up about 20% from the prior quarter and nearly double year-ago levels, with total funding also hitting its highest level in more than three years.
While no billion-dollar rounds led this week’s list, we nonetheless saw a variety of startups in industries ranging from semiconductors to aerospace to biotech raise sizable rounds.
Global venture funding to financial technology startups totaled $12 billion across 751 deals in 2026 as of April 6, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 5% increase in dollars raised compared to the $11.4 billion raised across 1,097 deals during the same time period in 2025.
AI tax prep automation startup Juno, founded to address the opportunities — and risks — that come with advances in AI, and built for underserved SMB accounting firms, says it has received a $12 million seed investment.
Startups in Latin America raised a combined $1.03 billion across seed- and growth-stage deals in the three-month period ending March 31 — up year over year, but down from Q4 2025.
The investors backing the highest number of startup rounds in a record-setting Q1 were mostly not the ones writing the biggest checks. And the ones funding the largest deals were not the most prolific dealmakers. To see who ranked high for deal counts and totals, we looked at active investors across multiple metrics.
In a quarter when nearly two-thirds of global venture capital went to just four companies, it’s easy to lose track of the many other companies getting funding to tackle interesting problems. We spotted five companies in just the past month working on issues from cleaner ferries and trains to foundational AI for the crop industry.
U.S. and Canadian companies secured a staggering $252.6 billion in seed- through growth-stage funding rounds in the first quarter of 2026 per Crunchbase data. That’s more than 3x the total raised in the prior quarter, and the largest quarterly total of all time.
Startup investors kept up the busy dealmaking pace this week with a number of big rounds. Top among them was a $1.75 billion Series D for Austin-based Saronic, developer of autonomous vessels.
A total of 47 seed- and early stage companies joined the unicorn ranks in the first quarter of this year, per Crunchbase data. Barring a major slowdown, that puts 2026 on track to deliver the largest cohort of young unicorns to date.
While AI and automation can be powerful, many applications use complex global systems to solve simple problems that could be handled locally. Guest author Itay Sagie shares three risks of undisciplined automation of everything, urging more thoughtful and disciplined use of technology.
Miravoice, a startup using AI voice agents to conduct long-form phone surveys, has raised $6.3 million in a seed funding round, the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
Anvil Robotics, an eight-month-old startup that aims to be the “Legos for robots,” has raised $5.5 million in a seed funding round, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
As of March 31, foundational AI startups had raised $178 billion across 24 deals, compared with $88.9 billion across 66 deals in all of 2025 in a 100% increase. That’s also significantly higher — 466.9% higher to be exact — than the $31.4 billion raised across 52 deals in 2024.
The first quarter of 2026 was unlike any other for venture investment, driven by unprecedented spending on AI compute and frontier labs. Crunchbase data shows investors poured $300 billion into 6,000 startups globally in the quarter, up over 150% quarter over quarter and year over year, marking an all-time high for global venture investment not approached by any other quarter on record.
Whoop, which provides wearable fitness technology and a subscription platform that tracks physiological data for insights, announced Tuesday that it raised $575 million in Series G funding at a $10.1 billion valuation.
A majority of top seed funding recipients in the past six months operate at the intersection of AI and the physical world. Using Crunchbase data, we take a look at some of the sector's biggest seed rounds in recent months.
The pace of large-scale dealmaking picked up some this week, led by OpenAI’s disclosure that it raised another $10 billion. Other big financings went to startups and growth-stage companies in sectors including defense tech, enterprise AI, autonomy and even laundry.
Austin’s startup scene is stronger than ever. That’s the consensus among investors in the city, and it’s borne out by Crunchbase data, which shows startups headquartered in the Lone Star State’s capital raised a record $7.19 billion in venture funding in 2025.
Among U.S. seed funding deals, it’s only the upper bands of larger and outlier seed rounds — those $10 million and above — that grew in 2025, Crunchbase data shows.
Over 127,000 workers at U.S.-based tech companies were laid off in mass job cuts in 2025, per a Crunchbase News tally, and the layoffs have continued into 2026. See the latest companies to cut roles.
Trayd, a startup that is building a back office operating system for the construction industry, has raised $10 million in Series A funding, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
San Francisco-based OpenAI has turned to M&A to boost its offerings and stay ahead of its rivals through acquisitions, which total 17 companies in the past three years, Crunchbase data shows.
