Analysis
Value Add Pulse's funding tracker crossed $196.2 billion across 521 disclosed deals in 2026, with another $44 billion locked into 32 separate VC fund closes. Read as a single headline number, that looks like a market awash in capital.
Read as a median, it looks different: the typical disclosed round tracked on our funding tracker is just $110 million.
That gap between the aggregate and the typical deal is the real story of 2026 venture math. The total is being pulled upward by a small number of enormous checks this quarter alone:
“Read as a median, it looks different: the typical disclosed round tracked on our funding tracker is just $110 million.”
- Ramp -- raise that pushed its valuation to $60B, led by Dragoneer Investment Group.
- OrbiMed -- new commitments across two healthcare-focused funds.
- Modal Labs -- Series D at a $15.75B valuation, led by Accel.
Three names account for a meaningful share of the quarter's disclosed total on their own.
The pattern is a barbell: a cluster of $100M-plus mega-rounds at one end, a long tail of smaller Series A and seed checks at the other, and comparatively little in between. Our recent coverage of the tracker crossing $196B noted the same dynamic -- mega-rounds piling up even as the broader deal count stays flat.
Worth noting: a median is less sensitive to outliers than an average, so $110M likely still overstates what the bottom half of this year's deals actually raised -- plenty of seed and Series A rounds tracked elsewhere on Pulse land well under $20M and don't move this median much either way. The $110M figure describes the deals large enough to get disclosed and tracked in the first place, not the full base of startup fundraising.
For founders, the practical read is that the market isn't uniformly generous. A handful of categories -- AI infrastructure, applied AI, and a few healthcare niches -- are pulling outsized checks, while most companies raising capital this year are doing so at a fraction of the size that makes Pulse's front page. GPs allocating into later rounds should expect the same bifurcation to keep showing up in their own portfolios' markups.