Analysis
The headline number is $47.4 billion across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, per Crunchbase News. The comparisons are what make it striking:
- H1 2026 -- $47.4 billion across 521 deals
- H2 2025 -- $12 billion across 470 deals
- H1 2025 -- $26.4 billion across 436 deals
- 2022-2024 combined -- $41.9 billion across three years
That single half now exceeds three prior years combined.
“From H2 2025 to H1 2026, dollars went up roughly 4x while the number of financings rose about 11%, from 470 to 521.”
Deal count is the tell. From H2 2025 to H1 2026, dollars went up roughly 4x while the number of financings rose about 11%, from 470 to 521. Average check size expanded dramatically; the number of companies getting funded barely did. Concentration is extreme at the top: Waymo's $16 billion Series D in February, co-led by Alphabet, Dragoneer, DST Global and Sequoia at a $126 billion valuation, was close to a third of the entire half by itself.
Crunchbase's definition covers robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, drones, industrial automation and sensors. Exits in the category have clustered in aerospace and defense rather than robotics:
- SpaceX -- June IPO raised $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation
- HawkEye 360 -- raised $416 million in its market debut
- Aevex -- raised $320 million
- Mobileye -- acquired Tel Aviv-based Mentee Robotics for roughly $900 million, the category's largest M&A datapoint, explicitly framed as a physical AI move
Edison Partners general partner Ryan Ziegler told Crunchbase the opportunity is wider than humanoids and defense, pointing to manufacturing, supply chain, utilities, agriculture and transportation -- applications where hardware plus sensors generate proprietary operational data over multi-year deployments. He noted that commodity components have made the category cheaper to build in: "Even our mobile phones now have LIDAR scanners on them."
Strip out Waymo and the half looks less like a boom and more like healthy growth: roughly $31 billion across 520 deals, still ahead of H1 2025 but not 4x anything. Both numbers are true. Which one describes your fund depends entirely on whether you can access rounds at Waymo's altitude.
