Every venture round we've covered on Value Add Pulse -- seed through mega-rounds, with the VC take on each.
Also, the micromobility company Rivian spun out in 2025, raised another $150M to expand from e-bikes and cargo quads into autonomous delivery vehicles, pushing its total funding past $500M.
London's Prevalent AI raised $22M from Integrity Growth Partners, its first outside investment in nine years of bootstrapped, profitable operation building an AI data fabric for large enterprises.
Orlando startup Relativity Networks raised $22M for hollow-core fiber that moves data 47% faster than glass fiber, and landed a $40M follow-on order from an unnamed hyperscaler.
Sachin Bansal's Indian fintech Navi raised $100M from Prosus at a roughly $1.3B valuation -- its first institutional capital after eight years of being funded entirely by its founder.
Rillet raised a $100 million Series C led by ICONIQ at a $1 billion valuation, its third round in a year, pushing total funding past $200 million for an AI-native accounting platform aimed at NetSuite and Sage.
Chicago-based Hopscotch raised a $53M Series D led by Town Hall Ventures to expand value-based pediatric and behavioral health care, betting outcomes-linked contracts scale better than telehealth access alone.
Etched raised $700 million led by Jane Street at a $21 billion valuation, doubling the $10.3 billion mark it set in July after the quant firm tested the startup's inference hardware and installed a rack in its own data center.
Anthro Energy broke ground on a Louisville factory sized for 25 gigawatt-hours of battery electrolytes annually, backed by $24.9 million from the Department of Energy and $18.4 million in investment tax credits.
Neko Health will open its first American location on September 24 at 300 Lafayette Street in SoHo, with more than 25,000 New Yorkers already on the waitlist, a month after raising a $700 million Series C.
Global venture funding into physical AI reached $47.4 billion across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, nearly 4x the second half of 2025 and more than the entire 2022-2024 period combined.
Reach Capital closed a $265 million Fund V to back AI founders in learning, health and work, raising it in under six months with LPs including Capricorn, the LEGO Foundation and the LA Fire and Police Pensions.
Smack Technologies raised a $61 million Series B led by Costanoa Ventures and First In, bringing total funding past $90 million, months after the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a "supply-chain risk" and sent military branches scrambling for alternative AI vendors.
SoftBank sole-invested $200 million into Gravis Robotics, a 75-person ETH Zurich spinout that retrofits excavators with autonomy kits, at a $1 billion valuation -- what the company calls the largest Series A in construction-robotics history.
SoftBank invested $200 million in Gravis Robotics, a Zurich startup that retrofits excavators with autonomous software, in what the company calls the largest Series A in construction-robotics history.
Voice AI startup Wispr raised a $280 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2 billion valuation, more than six times its prior mark, as it expands from dictation into meeting notes and other text-box replacements.
Wispr Flow raised a $280 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $2 billion valuation, bringing total funding to $361 million less than ten months after its prior round, and previewed a proprietary speech model that cuts word-error rates from over 30% to as low as 5%.
Semiconductor companies have participated in startup financings collectively valued at more than $250 billion in 2026, with Nvidia alone taking part in a record 59 rounds and leading or co-leading at least 11.
AI video and image startup Higgsfield raised a $400 million Series B at a $5.4 billion valuation, four times its mark from eight months ago, on $700 million in annualized revenue.
Nvidia disclosed a stake in SpaceX worth roughly $21 billion at the end of Q2, its second-largest equity holding, acquired through its earlier $10 billion investment in xAI before SpaceX absorbed the company.
Groq raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion valuation, down from $6.9 billion last September, as it completes a pivot from AI chipmaker to inference cloud provider after Nvidia hired its founder in a $20 billion licensing deal.
Nigerian defense-tech startup Terra Industries closed a $52 million seed round, one of Africa's largest, and is opening a London office while booking $100 million in contracts including a federal deal.
Ohio-based Sonic Fire Tech raised a $15 million round to develop infrasound fire suppression that extinguishes flames with low-frequency sound waves instead of water or chemicals.
Uber is making a strategic investment in Zipline as part of a partnership to bring drone delivery to Uber Eats, targeting one million daily drone deliveries by the end of 2029.
Anduril's talks for a $100 billion valuation, up from $61 billion two months ago, are the headline, but the real story is how deep the defense-tech funding bench has gotten behind it.
Databricks' $5 billion round at a $190 billion valuation, Together AI's doubled $8.3 billion mark, and Fireworks AI's leap to $17.5 billion trace a single financing pattern reshaping AI infrastructure investing.
Whatnot doubled its valuation to $20 billion in a live-shopping market that has nothing to do with AI, proof that non-AI consumer businesses can still command venture megaround pricing in 2026.
Five disclosed rounds in the first two weeks of August 2026 -- Databricks, Firmus, River AI, Lovable and Form Energy -- total roughly $9.25 billion, with data infrastructure and AI compute taking three quarters of it.
River AI raised $1.1 billion across a seed and Series A two months after leaving stealth, the clearest example yet of a 2026 pattern where pre-product AI infrastructure companies raise growth-stage sums at formation.
Forty companies crossed $1 billion in valuation in July alone, the fastest monthly pace in four years -- but a rising share of that math is markup, not revenue, and founders optimizing for the headline number are optimizing for the wrong thing.
Archer Aviation agreed to acquire Boeing's Wisk Aero along with SkyGrid and Insitu, a deal that would give Boeing a 16.5% stake in Archer, while Joby paid $500 million for Resonant Sciences to launch a defense arm.
Five of the month's largest venture rounds funded nuclear reactors, home batteries, GPU-training infrastructure and automated factories rather than software, a distribution that says more about where capital is scarce than about any single pitch deck.
Harvard Management Company's 13F filing showed a $2.2 billion SpaceX position, the largest single stock in its disclosed U.S. equity book, turning a venture bet placed more than a decade ago into the endowment's biggest public holding.
At least 18 fusion-energy companies have raised more than $100 million each in private capital, led by Commonwealth Fusion Systems at roughly $3.94 billion and Helion at $3.2 billion in committed capital.
Five AI coding-tool startups now carry valuations above $1 billion after this month's rounds, a cluster of pricing that says more about how much capital is chasing the category than about any one company's product lead.
August alone has produced a $250 million Neros Technologies round and a fresh $1.37 billion Hadrian raise, extending a defense-tech funding pace that has now outrun every full prior year on record.
Form Energy raised $750 million led by T. Rowe Price to scale its 100-hour iron-air grid battery technology, the third-largest round in Crunchbase's tracking of this week's biggest U.S. deals behind Databricks and River AI.
A Newcomer profile describes Thrive Capital settling into three distinct strategies: a $9 billion growth fund, a $1 billion early-stage vehicle, and Thrive Holdings, which buys into AI-transformation bets inside existing companies.
A regulatory filing disclosed Nvidia's SpaceX and Intel stakes are now worth roughly $51 billion combined, the first time the chipmaker has put a number on its SpaceX position since folding its xAI investment into the company.
Crunchbase counted 40 new companies crossing $1 billion in valuation in July 2026, the highest monthly total in more than four years, led by three decacorns that added a combined $49 billion in value.
Companies backed by SpaceX and Blue Origin have begun early talks with insurers about covering orbital AI data centers, a nascent risk category where global space-insurance premiums total only $500-750 million a year today.
Thrive Capital founder Joshua Kushner has agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers for $12.5 billion, one of the largest sports franchise transactions ever, extending a venture investor's reach deep into professional sports ownership.
This week's Databricks, Cognition and Anthropic developments show valuation cycles for AI leaders compressing from years to months, forcing founders and investors to rethink how long a primary valuation should even hold.
A cluster of S-1 and S-1/A filings hit the SEC this week, including two blank-check acquisition vehicles, pointing to renewed small-cap IPO and SPAC registration activity even as attention concentrates on mega-cap AI listings.
A growing share of 2026's largest AI funding rounds are being priced across two separate valuation tranches in the same raise, a structure that lets late-stage investors buy in at different price points within one deal.
Khartis Therapeutics emerged from stealth with $95 million in total funding, including a new $50 million Series B, to develop an oral alternative to injectable treatments for thyroid eye disease.
Mindgard raised a $30 million Series A led by Album VC to scale an automated red-teaming platform for AI systems, after its research uncovered a zero-day flaw in Cursor and defects in Google Antigravity and ChatGPT.
Databricks closed a $5 billion round at a $190 billion valuation led by Coatue, after the company said it crossed a $7 billion annualized revenue run-rate with more than 80% year-over-year growth.
Five investors who put $1.2 million into Selena Gomez's mental-health startup Wondermind are suing her and her mother, alleging securities fraud and breach of contract after the company quietly collapsed without informing backers.
Bridge to Life closed $110 million in Series C equity funding plus additional debt financing for its organ preservation and perfusion technology, part of a broader wave of biotech capital chasing transplant and longevity-adjacent medtech in 2026.
Precision-munitions startup Heaviside raised a $60 million Series B at a $600 million valuation, more than 21 times its Series A price three months ago, and partnered with Norwegian defense manufacturer Nammo to supply warheads.
Trunk Tools founder Sarah Buchner, a former carpenter and general contractor, has grown the construction-AI startup's revenue fourfold in the past year on top of a $40 million Series B valuing it at $325 million.
Cognition, maker of the AI coding agent Devin, is reportedly in early talks to raise more than $1 billion at a valuation above $40 billion, up from $26 billion three months ago, as its revenue run rate nears $1 billion.
AI coding startup Cognition is in early talks for a new round that could value it above $40 billion, more than 50% above the $26 billion mark it set in May, as it approaches a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate.
Thrive Holdings, the Thrive Capital spinout that acquires services businesses and rebuilds them with AI, raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation from SoftBank, D1 Capital and Altimeter, with OpenAI as an equity holder.
Form Energy raised a $750 million Series G led by T. Rowe Price to expand its iron-air batteries, which store power for up to 100 hours and are being bought by Google, Xcel Energy and Crusoe for AI data center power.
CodeRabbit raised $143 million in a Series C led by Atomico and Smash Capital at a $1.5 billion valuation, with revenue up more than 5x as the AI-code-review startup pitches itself as the governance layer for a flood of AI-generated code.
Vibe-coding startup Lovable closed a $400 million Series C at a $13.3 billion valuation, doubling its worth from December, after crossing $500 million in annualized revenue and projecting $600 million by month's end.
Skan AI raised a $63 million Series C co-led by Cathay Innovation and Dell Technologies Capital to expand a platform mapping how employees actually work, arguing AI agents fail from missing context, not weak models.
ClearJet, an Austin logistics startup that fills unused cargo space on commercial flights, raised a $25 million Series B led by Edison Partners after tripling revenue and approaching nine figures in annual sales while already profitable.
Blacksmith, a code-testing and validation startup, raised a $45 million Series B led by Peak XV Partners at a $550 million valuation, up from $60 million less than a year earlier, as AI-generated code drives demand for faster validation.
