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.
To get an expanded sense of how busy startup backers spent Q2, we put together several rankings for active investors. These include active venture backers, lead investors, highest spenders and prolific seed dealmakers.
SaaS metrics like LTV/CAC, NRR, GRR, ARR growth, and the Rule of 40 are valuable indicators of business performance, writes guest author Itay Sagie, but leaders and boards should look beyond the numbers to understand the underlying drivers to assess the company's long-term health and competitive strength.
Overall, investment in U.S. and Canadian startups totaled a staggering $392 billion for the first half of 2026, per Crunchbase data, dwarfing anything we’ve seen before.
In the first half of this year, investors poured $15 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for companies in Crunchbase cleantech, EV and sustainability-focused categories. That puts funding on track to slightly exceed the 2025 tally, which was the lowest in several years.
Many venture capital LPs have reacted to recent economic uncertainty by concentrating investments in megafunds, mistaking perceived safety for better returns while potentially sacrificing the higher upside that venture investing is meant to deliver. In this guest commentary, Sara Zulkosky, co-founder and managing partner of Recast Capital, contends that smaller emerging VC managers are a more attractive source of long-term returns for investors willing to look beyond the crowd.
U.S. startups announced sizable funding rounds at a steady clip during a truncated holiday week, with energy and AI leading the way. Houston-based energy startup Joulent secured the biggest round, a $1.75 billion strategic financing.
Investors poured more than $200 billion into startups globally in the just-ended quarter, making Q2 2026 the second-largest quarter on record, our data shows. And, with IPOs and acquisitions returning in force, the second quarter notched one of the strongest periods for venture-backed exits in years.
Tapestry VC has closed an $80 million third fund to double down on Europe’s repeat founders and expects the coming wave of AI exits to produce yet another generation of experienced founders.
Omnea, a London-based artificial intelligence software company that helps businesses manage their supplier spending, is challenging traditional venture models with the launch of the Omnea Future Founders Fund to give its employees who have completed five years of service a chance to pitch for $250,000 in seed funding to launch their own companies.
Venture capital firms are using AI the wrong way, argues Gilion's Henrik Landgren, who says that building better data infrastructure and connecting directly to sources like financial, payment and accounting systems would improve due diligence, help investors identify overlooked startups, and make investment decisions both faster and more accurate.
The artificial intelligence space saw two major developments last week that highlight how technology companies are trying to manage the soaring costs and complexity of AI computing. In an interview with Crunchbase News, Dave Munichiello, a managing partner at GV, discusses the mechanics behind the Qualcomm-Modular deal, the practical realities of managing hardware scarcity, and what the current wave of consolidation means for the future of independent startups.
Startup exits valued at $1 billion or more are now more numerous than at any point since the 2021 market peak, Crunchbase data shows.
The trend we’re seeing for the second quarter of 2026 includes both the largest venture-backed exit of all time and a bevy of other comparatively tinier but still sizable startup exits through acquisition or IPO.
This week, most of the largest U.S. startup funding rounds centered around the sector one would suspect: artificial intelligence. Beyond that, the next-biggest area for startup funding was biotech.
In the final installment of our series on the state of venture investment to Black-founded startups, six investors offer their advice for overlooked founders and explain how the venture industry can broaden access to capital by rethinking sourcing, networks and long-held investing patterns.
While SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition of Anysphere dominates the headlines, a number of other multibillion-dollar transactions have also closed this year. We take a look at the 10 largest M&A deals so far in 2026.
XCures, a startup that uses AI to streamline patient data and medical records, has closed a Innovius Capital-led $46 million Series B financing round, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
In this Crunchbase News Q&A, Gigascale Capital founder Mike Schroepfer discusses the coming power crunch, why infrastructure has become a strategic moat, and how breakthroughs in everything from batteries to robotics could reshape the economy over the next decade.
Venture firm Menlo Ventures has raised $3 billion across two new funds, the largest capital raise in its 50-year history, to invest in AI startups from seed through growth stage. The firm says the new capital will target companies in sectors from enterprise tools to healthcare.
Longstanding Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan passed away Monday at age 100. But for those of us old enough to remember the dot-com boom, his legacy looms large.
The next wave of software will be AI-native, industry-specific platforms, writes guest author Richard de Silva who believes the biggest winners will be vertical AI companies with deep domain expertise, proprietary data and strong customer relationships, as these advantages create durable competitive moats that generic horizontal SaaS products cannot match.
Globally, robotics startups have so far raised $18.8 billion in 2026, compared to $15 billion in the full year of 2025. The figure also handily surpasses the $14.1 billion raised in the peak venture funding year of 2021, and we still have more than six months of fundraising left. We use Crunchbase data to see where the funding went.
Seedcamp, one of Europe’s earliest seed investors, has closed on its 7th fund of $220 million and a select fund 2 of $100 million to invest in winners from the core fund.
This week was not an exceptionally busy one for large funding deals, though we saw sizable rounds in a lively mix of sectors ranging from AI to fintech to quantum computing, biotech and cybersecurity.
In an interview with Crunchbase News, Vikram Taneja, head of AT&T Ventures, shares why he believes that while AI has drastically lowered the barrier to building software, it has also shifted the definition of seed-stage technical risk.
Boards should not wait for poor performance before confronting disruptive technologies like AI and quantum computing. Instead, writes guest columnist and strategic adviser Itay Sagie, they should evaluate the cost of inaction, challenge successful business models while they are still thriving, and proactively imagine how a technology-driven competitor could disrupt their company.
The consistently low numbers of U.S. venture funding to Black founders led some to turn to investing in an effort to help level the playing field. Crunchbase News talked with two such founders to hear more about their experiences in raising capital and what they’ve learned from investing.
The greatest long-term value in AI will come from companies solving deep technical challenges at the model and infrastructure level rather than application-layer products built on existing AI platforms, writes angel investor Alexander Kardos-Nyheim. In this guest commentary he shares processes and questions he uses to determine the investability of an AI startup.
The acquisition of Cursor gives SpaceX a foothold into the enterprise software development market, where AI-assisted coding has taken off and led large companies to significantly pare back their reliance on human engineers.
In the decade-plus since Playground Global's founding, it has built its investment thesis around the idea that breakthroughs in science and engineering — not just software — would create the next generation of valuable companies. Company co-founder Peter Barrett breaks it down in this Crunchbase News Q&A.
Because AI and LLMs are reshaping the traditional SaaS model, founders are forced to focus less on software alone and more on delivering measurable business outcomes, defensible workflow ownership, strong retention, and efficient growth. Crunchbase guest author, Ivan Nikkhoo argues that rather than chasing trends like adding services, founders should build deep moats, understand customer workflows, adapt pricing toward usage- or outcome-based models, and prove that AI creates lasting value.
So far in 2026, U.S. companies have pulled in nearly 80% of global seed- through growth-stage financing, per Crunchbase data. That’s a sharp divergence from the years leading up to the AI boom, when American companies typically secured less than half of all investment.
In the U.S., the largest financings went to enterprise software company NinjaOne and blockchain technology provider Digital Asset. The largest deals of the week, however, were for European companies.
The SpaceX offering caps a remarkable journey for a company that has raised nearly $12 billion in private investment since its founding in 2002 to become the world’s most valuable venture-backed startup. Along the way, the company helped redefine both the space industry and the late-stage venture market.
A public SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic would become some of the best-capitalized acquirers on the planet, writes MGV's Marc Schröder, who explains that the bigger impact for startups is likely to be stronger M&A activity, with acquisitions rather than IPOs being the most important exit path for many founders and investors.
With a strong focus on logistics, payroll, construction and other sectors, San Francisco-based Base10 Partners has raised two funds totaling $850 million: a seed and Series A fund 4, and a Series B fund 2 to invest in automation for the real economy.
The semiconductor startup space continues to sizzle. So far in 2026, investors have poured around $10 billion into seed through pre-IPO rounds for companies in Crunchbase’s semiconductor category.
A total of 29 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in May, but the standout trend was not new AI models, but rather the businesses helping enterprises put AI to work.
Successful vertical AI startups are increasingly using channels like private equity networks and industry conferences to drive distribution, recognizing that larger deal sizes require a fundamentally different go-to-market playbook than traditional vertical SaaS. Guest author Medha Agarwal, a general partner at Defy.vc, explains just what that means.
Want to keep track of the largest startup funding deals in 2026 with our curated list of $100 million-plus venture deals to U.S.-based companies? Check out The Crunchbase Megadeals Board. This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out last week’s biggest funding deal […]
Although defense-side legal AI remains underdeveloped despite a large market opportunity, writes guest author Patrick Ip, investors are increasingly watching whether startups can build scalable platforms around litigation intelligence, risk benchmarking and proprietary outcome data for corporate legal departments.
A grab bag of funded startups caught our attention this past month, from a previously bootstrapped custom metal manufacturer that got its first outside funding from big-name Silicon Valley backers, to a startup that aims to provide geothermal energy from underwater volcanoes to small island nations.
All told, global venture funding reached $92 billion in May, marking the second-largest monthly total on record, just behind February, Crunchbase data shows. Of that, Anthropic raised $50 billion, or 54% of the month’s total funding.
Already this year, more than $14.6 billion in venture investment has gone into companies in Crunchbase’s military, national security and law enforcement categories, blowing past the sector's previous annual record of $9.6 billion raised in all of 2025.
Reports of “SaaS being dead” are misguided, writes guest author Bob Morse, who contends that AI will enable software companies to move beyond selling productivity tools to deliver knowledge-work outcomes directly, unlocking massive unmet demand for services, ultimately growing the software industry.
Anthropic said Monday that it has submitted a confidential filing for a proposed IPO, marking an escalation in the race among generative AI behemoths to make it first to the public market.
When investor trust is built through repeated in-person encounters, authentic conversations and thought leadership on meaningful problems, relationships and visibility matter more than aggressive fundraising outreach, argues guest author Alyx van der Vorm, whose startup raised $14 million as the result of personal interactions.
So far this year, investors have put about $7.8 billion into Boston-area startups, per Crunchbase data. That puts the region on track for a moderate annual gain and the strongest tally in about four years.
