Every venture round we've covered on Value Add Pulse -- seed through mega-rounds, with the VC take on each.
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.
Reservoir, a Boston-area startup, raised an $8 million seed round led by Asymmetric Capital Partners to sell heat pump water heaters that shift electricity use to off-peak hours and act as a distributed grid asset.
Swedish vibe-coding startup Lovable raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, doubling its worth in eight months as annualized revenue approaches $600 million.
Fitness and wellness startups raised $3.6 billion in H1 2026, a third higher than 2025's six-year funding low, though the recovery is concentrated in fewer, larger AI-enabled rounds.
River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, raised $1.1 billion led by General Catalyst just two months after stealth, betting enterprises can train AI models without a dedicated infra team.
Neros Technologies raised a $250 million Series C co-led by Sequoia Capital and the American Strategic Technology Fund at a $2.5 billion valuation, funding a push to build 1 million US-made drones a year by 2028.
Accel closed a $3.5 billion early-stage fund split across the US, Europe/Israel and India, its second major AI-focused vehicle in four months after backing Anthropic, Cursor and Perplexity.
Flagler Health raised a $50 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners to build an AI-native platform coordinating clinical and administrative workflows for musculoskeletal care providers.
Vaderis Therapeutics closed an oversubscribed $152.5 million Series B co-led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives and TCGX to fund a global Phase 3 trial of its drug for a rare blood vessel disorder.
Accel closed its ninth India-focused fund at $550 million, oversubscribed and completed within weeks, even though the firm still has more than 55% of its prior $650 million India vehicle left to invest.
Infinimmune raised a $75 million Series A co-led by Regeneron Ventures and Playground Global to advance two atopic dermatitis antibody candidates built from its human-derived Anthrobody platform.
Corma, Zenity and Horizon3 raised a combined $435 million in the first ten days of August for AI-agent and AI-driven cybersecurity defense, three separate bets that defensive tooling is under-capitalized relative to offensive AI capability.
Yulu, a Bengaluru-based electric two-wheeler subscription platform, raised $93 million in Series C funding as India's quick-commerce boom drives delivery-driver demand ahead of an eventual IPO.
Aureka Biotechnologies raised a $100 million Series B led by Granite Asia to train biological foundation models for drug discovery, bringing the AI-native TechBio company's total funding to nearly $200 million.
Point2 Technology expanded its Series B to $136 million as chip designer Arm joined as a strategic investor, backing the San Jose startup's RF-over-plastic interconnect technology for AI data center scale-up systems.
inKind, an Austin-based restaurant commerce platform, closed an oversubscribed $414 million financing tranche led by Citi and Cross River, pushing its total capital raised past $1.2 billion.
Corma, a Tel Aviv and San Francisco startup, emerged from stealth with a $60 million seed round led by Sequoia Capital to build what it calls the first foundation model purpose-built for defensive cybersecurity.
Cambridge Aerospace, a British drone-and-missile interceptor startup, raised a $300 million Series C led by DFJ Growth at a $3.4 billion valuation, taking its total raised past $630 million in under two years.
Aurelius Systems raised a $40M Series A to scale Archimedes, its autonomous laser system for tracking and neutralizing small drones, co-led by Draper Associates and KAS Venture Partners.
Cover Genius, a New York-based embedded-insurance platform, raised $100M from Vista Credit Partners at a $1.9B valuation, backed by 50% year-over-year revenue growth.
Digital health venture funding reached $7.4 billion in the first half of 2026, with 19 companies raising 20 megadeals of $100 million or more -- 45% of all capital invested in the sector.
Robotics startups have raised more than $23 billion in 2026, nearly matching all of 2025, with humanoid-specific funding alone reaching $8.6 billion -- 1.8 times last year's full-year total with five months still to go.
Semiconductor startups raised around $10.7 billion in seed-through-pre-IPO rounds in 2026 as of June 10, according to Crunchbase News, led by Cerebras' $1 billion pre-IPO round and $500 million raises by MatX, Ayar Labs and Etched; Etched raised again in July at a $10.3 billion valuation.
Simile, CAIS, Eliyan and Freehand raised a combined $590M in the last two weeks of July for synthetic-user modeling, alternative-investment AI, chip interconnects and supply-chain agents — infrastructure and tooling money the model-layer headlines mostly missed.
Anduril remains in talks to raise at a roughly $100B valuation just weeks after Hadrian's own 5x step-up to $7.87B — two data points suggesting defense-tech valuations are compounding faster than the underlying contract backlogs are being disclosed.
Lumilens' $700M+ raise pushes this week's tally of AI physical-infrastructure funding -- reactors, batteries, fabs and now optical networking -- to roughly $19.5B across four distinct layers of the stack.
Hadrian's $1.37B round, Function Health's $450M raise and OLIX's $312M photonic-chip round pushed this week's three largest US-linked venture rounds past $2.1B combined, none of it going to a foundation model.
Live-shopping platform Whatnot raised $545 million at a $20 billion valuation without an AI story to tell -- proof that durable consumer businesses still get funded on their own merits.
K2 Space, Zenity, HappyRobot and Convex raised a combined ~$832M in eight days -- satellites, AI-agent security, enterprise agents and AI-native backend infrastructure, not a single foundation model among them.
Australian AI infrastructure builder Firmus Grid closed a fully subscribed $2 billion round from Nvidia, Coatue and Blackstone, pushing its valuation above $10.5 billion to fund AI-factory expansion across Australia and Asia-Pacific.
Former bitcoin miner Firmus Grid raised a $2 billion strategic round from Nvidia, Coatue and Blackstone, pushing its post-money valuation above $10.5 billion to build AI data centers across Australia and the Asia-Pacific.
Three separate US infrastructure rounds this week -- Valar Atomics' $1B nuclear raise, Base Power's $1B grid battery round, and Tesla-SpaceX's $16.8B chip fab -- show investors funding the physical layer beneath AI as heavily as the models themselves.
Naive raised a $28.5M Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners to let AI coding agents like Cursor and Claude Code provision payments, phone numbers and US LLC incorporation through a single API.
Hadrian raised a $1.37B Series D at a $7.87B valuation -- roughly 5x its prior mark -- to build automated factories that machine precision parts for SpaceX, Anduril and other aerospace and defense suppliers.
Six rounds priced between August 3 and 6 -- Base Power, Valar Atomics, ICEYE, Olix, Obsidian Security and Faye -- add up to roughly $3.5B in fresh capital, almost all of it flowing to physical AI infrastructure, not software.
Hadrian raised $1.37 billion led by Baillie Gifford and JPMorgan Strategic Investment Group at a $7.9 billion valuation, more than quadrupling its January mark as investors pour capital into AI-driven defense manufacturing.
Faye raised a $50M Series C led by Madrona at an estimated $500M valuation, funding growth for its AI-powered travel protection platform that pays claims directly instead of routing through legacy insurers.
Omilia, a Cyprus-based conversational AI company, raised a $67M Series B led by Expedition Growth Capital after growing annual recurring revenue tenfold to $60M, its first raise since a $20M round in 2020.
DeepSeek resumed a funding round targeting 50 billion yuan at a roughly 500 billion yuan pre-money valuation, expected to close in late August, while separately warning developers of significant API price increases ahead.
OpenAI acquired patents from Rain AI, the Sam Altman-backed chip startup, after a full acquisition fell through when Rain AI's own $150M funding round failed to attract investors.
Moove raised a $250M Series C led by Mubadala at a $2.1B valuation, repositioning its 42,000-vehicle ride-hailing fleet business as financing and operations infrastructure for the robotaxi industry, including future Waymo purchases.
Klaviyo agreed to acquire Agency, the three-year-old AI customer-success startup founded by Elias Torres, who backed Klaviyo's 2015 seed round as an angel and will now join as chief product officer.
Jeff Dean left Google after 27 years to co-found Discovery Loop, an AI research startup automating scientific discovery, with Google staying on as a founding investor and cloud partner.
Finnish satellite radar company ICEYE raised a 1B EUR Series F including a 450M EUR primary round at a valuation above 10B EUR, with the EU-backed Scaleup Europe Fund co-leading its first-ever investment.
Apollo Global Management named a dedicated AI sector head to coordinate financing teams and pursue repeat megadeals with chipmakers, building on its $35 billion Broadcom AI infrastructure financing struck in June.
MagicSchool AI, an AI teaching-assistant platform founded by a former school principal, has raised $63M total after early investors initially passed, and now serves educators in nearly every US school district.
MagicSchool AI, founded by a former school principal who says VCs initially refused to fund an educator, has now raised $63M and reaches an educator in nearly every US school district.
Robinhood is listing a publicly tradable fund that invests in current and former Y Combinator startups, opening up to $200M of early-stage venture exposure to any retail investor for the first time.
WindBorne Systems raised $37M for its balloon-based atmospheric sensor network, selling proprietary weather data to forecasters and insurers who say government satellite and balloon coverage has thinned in the wrong places.
St. Louis has attracted roughly $25B in announced data center investment, a sign the AI infrastructure buildout is spreading well beyond the traditional hubs of Northern Virginia and Texas.
AI cloud startup Volta launched out of stealth with a $300M seed and Series A at a $2.4B valuation plus a six-year, roughly $10B compute deal reportedly with Anthropic, tied to a 133MW Norway site built with Bitdeer.
Seven-month-old startup Volta Infra emerged from stealth with a $10B, six-year compute deal to supply Anthropic from a Norway data center built with Bitdeer, plus a separate $5B financing program to fund more sites.
Robinhood's second closed-end venture fund, set to list publicly on August 13 at $25/share, will let any retail investor buy exposure to Y Combinator startups for the first time.
WindBorne Systems, which raised $37M at a $250M valuation earlier this year, is now testing whether AI weather forecasts accurate enough to beat government agencies can also be a real business, not just a research feat.
River, an Indian electric two-wheeler startup, raised a $120M Series C after scaling production with a single motorcycle model, betting on India's fast-growing EV two-wheeler market.
Bengaluru-based electric two-wheeler maker River raised $120M led by Elev8 and Claypond Capital, taking total funding to $144M as it scales manufacturing and launches new models.
Days after its $2.4B valuation round, Volta Infra disclosed it will lease Norway-based capacity from Bitdeer to help deliver its reported $10B, six-year compute contract with a leading AI developer.
Obsidian Security raised an $85M Series D led by Crescent Cove Advisors at a $1.1B valuation, becoming a unicorn on demand for securing AI agents and non-human identities inside enterprises.
Prysm Capital and Eurazeo led a $150M Series C for HappyRobot at a $1.2B valuation, backing AI agents that handle the phone calls, emails and documents moving freight between brokers, carriers and shippers.
Bending Spoons agreed to acquire Airtable for $1.28B in cash, its first deal since going public -- an 88% markdown from Airtable's $11B peak valuation during the 2021 boom.
