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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.