Every venture round we've covered on Value Add Pulse -- seed through mega-rounds, with the VC take on each.
This week's largest rounds -- satellites, thermal batteries, alt-investment infrastructure -- are one thesis: capital is chasing the bottlenecks between AI's compute buildout and its return on capital.
Function Health raised $450 million in growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, eight months after a $298 million Series B, to keep scaling its lab-testing-and-imaging preventive health platform nationwide.
Bidbus raised a $15 million Series A led by Ibex Investors to scale its real-time marketplace where licensed car dealers bid directly against each other for vehicles sourced straight from consumers.
Ryan Williams, co-founder of real estate platform Cadre, emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed funding for Ellis, an AI-native platform aimed at fixing private credit managers' fragmented data workflows.
Smallest.ai raised $13 million led by Seligman Ventures to keep building voice AI models focused narrowly on speed and human-sounding speech rather than general-purpose foundation model scale.
DataBahn closed a $40 million Series B led by Insight Partners for its platform that collects, governs and routes security, IoT and observability data across enterprise systems and AI models.
Simile raised a $200 million Series B led by Greenoaks at a $2 billion valuation, just five months after its $100 million Series A, to build foundation models that simulate how humans will respond to products and decisions before they ship.
Okta agreed to acquire AI identity security startup Permiso for roughly $200 million in an almost all-cash deal, aiming to extend threat detection to autonomous AI agents and other non-human identities.
Synthetic-user startup Simile closed a $200 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation, just five months after its $100 million Series A, to scale AI simulations that predict how real people will behave.
K2 Space raised a $500 million Series D co-led by Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ, valuing the large-satellite manufacturer at $6.8 billion as it targets building up to 100 large satellites a year for commercial and defense customers.
Assured raised $19 million in Series A funding led by Insight Partners to build AI agents that automate healthcare provider back-office operations, with First Round Capital and Kindred Ventures also returning.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems raised another $1 billion from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and industrial partners, bringing total capital raised to $4 billion as it builds Sparc and designs its first commercial Arc power plant.
Inforcer raised a $50 million Series C led by Insight Partners to help managed service providers secure small and midsize businesses' Microsoft 365 environments against a new wave of AI-driven threats.
K2 Space raised a $500 million Series D at a $6.8 billion valuation, co-led by Kleiner Perkins and Iconiq, to scale production of large, high-power satellites for data-heavy communications and defense missions.
CAIS raised a $170 million Series D led by Vista Equity Partners at a valuation above $2 billion, funding the alternative-investment platform's push to expand access for the more than 65,000 independent financial advisors already on its network.
Antora Energy closed a $550 million Series C, one of the year's largest cleantech rounds, to scale thermal batteries that store electricity as heat for industrial and data-center customers.
CAIS raised $170 million in Series D funding led by Vista Equity Partners at a valuation above $2 billion, adding strategic investors including Blue Owl, Carlyle, and Fortress to scale its alternative-investments platform for independent financial advisors.
Groundcover raised a $100 million Series C led by One Peak at a $500 million valuation, betting that AI agents -- not just human engineers -- are now the primary users of observability tooling.
Onyx Security closed a $113 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, adding to a wave of nine-figure cybersecurity rounds closing the same week as ThreatLocker's $190 million raise.
Freehand raised a $75 million Series B led by Battery Ventures, bringing total funding to $100 million for its AI system that negotiates, adjudicates and settles complex procurement spend.
Breakthru Medicine emerged from stealth with a $60 million Series A to build a molecular glue platform and a pipeline of small molecules and antibody-drug conjugate payloads.
Polar, an AI browser startup founded by a former Perplexity engineer who worked on Comet, raised $5.7 million in seed funding led by Madrona to automate hours of repetitive browser-based knowledge work.
ThreatLocker raised $190 million in Series F funding led by Elephant to extend its zero-trust cybersecurity platform to govern AI agents, pushing total funding toward $500 million on top of a prior $1.6 billion valuation.
Zero-trust security vendor ThreatLocker raised a $190 million Series F led by Elephant with new backing from Koch Disruptive Technologies, pushing total funding toward $500 million as it extends its platform to secure AI agents.
Eliyan raised $145 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation, becoming a unicorn as it scales chiplet interconnect technology designed to fix the data bottleneck that leaves AI chips idle much of the time.
Freehand raised $75 million in Series B funding co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners to expand its enterprise AI platform for supply-chain automation, bringing its total funding to $100 million.
Freehand raised a $75 million Series B to scale AI agents that manage Fortune 500 supply-chain spend, with customers including Meta, Unilever, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson already live on the platform.
Encore AI raised a $30 million Series A led by Team8, Planven, and The Garage to automate enterprise customer operations for banks and insurers, with several commercial banks and insurance companies joining as strategic investors.
Encore AI raised a $30 million Series A led by Team8 to build AI agents that improve by learning directly from recorded customer service calls rather than static training data.
Encore AI, which analyzes company call and chat data to train AI agents on what top performers actually do, raised a $30 million Series A led by Team8 after rebranding from its original Insait IO identity.
InvestiFi raised $20 million led by Vibe Credit Union to expand its digital-investing platform for credit unions and community banks, with eight additional credit unions joining the round as strategic backers.
ChipAgents raised a $60 million Series A extension led by B Capital to scale its AI-agent platform for semiconductor design, expanding its strategic collaboration with Nvidia and bringing total funding to $131 million.
Fish Audio raised a $52 million seed round led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today to build AI voice models for creators and enterprises, on the back of $21 million in annual recurring revenue and more than 8 million users in its first year.
Chicago-based Jump Capital closed its largest fund to date at $350 million, expanding a Series A-focused strategy into AI, fintech and blockchain infrastructure investing.
Satellite-tracking startup Array Labs raised an additional $21 million with Mitsubishi Electric anchoring the oversubscribed round, alongside a new partnership to bring satellite-based maritime and aircraft tracking to defense customers across Asia-Pacific.
Spur Intelligence, a bootstrapped bot-detection startup founded by two former Defense Department engineers, raised $200 million from Insight Partners after nine years of profitable operation without outside capital.
Tel Aviv-based Act Security disclosed $60 million across seed and Series A rounds from Team8, Bessemer, and others to build cloud access control and AI-agent governance tools for enterprises.
Anduril is exploring a new round that could value it near $100 billion, more than triple the $61 billion mark from its $5 billion raise months ago -- a jump that reads more like an IPO stall tactic than pure growth.
RAM costs sextupling, Samsung's $200B HBM4E deal with Broadcom, and CXMT's blistering $540B Shanghai debut are three faces of one supply shock now reshaping how VCs underwrite anything with a bill of materials.
G42 backing Nvidia's security alliance, Nvidia taking a $1B stake in Naver, and Angola's own state IPO all point the same direction: state and sovereign capital is now a structural, not occasional, funder of the AI buildout.
Hush Security raised a $30 million Series A, with Akamai joining as a strategic investor, to close the governance gap between enterprises and the AI agents now acting inside their systems -- a problem this week's OpenAI-Hugging Face breach made painfully concrete.
Climate tech company Claros Technologies closed a $55 million Series B, with investors including Treehouse Family Capital, Daikin America, and Veralto, to push PFAS destruction technology into broader commercial deployment.
Cloud-access security startup Act Security emerged from stealth disclosing $60 million in combined funding -- a $20M seed led by Team8 and Bessemer, plus a $40M Series A led by Notable Capital -- to secure human, workload and AI-agent access.
Hush Security raised a $30 million Series A from Akamai Technologies, Battery Ventures, and YL Ventures, bringing its total raised to $41 million, to secure non-human identities as enterprises hand more system access to AI agents.
ZuriQ, a Swiss quantum computing startup spun out of ETH Zurich, raised $25.5 million in seed funding led by Quantonation to scale a new two-dimensional trapped-ion processor architecture.
Augustus raised $180 million in a Tiger Global-led Series B at a $1 billion valuation, giving financial institutions worldwide direct access to dollar accounts without relying on a chain of correspondent banks.
Self-improving AI startup Recursive Superintelligence signed a multi-year $410 million compute deal with Amazon Web Services, months after raising $650 million at a $4.65 billion valuation.
Cathedral, a startup building US military cyber capabilities and founded by a team with DOGE ties, raised $160 million with backing from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Claros closed a $55 million Series B to push its PFAS destruction technology, including a UV-based system and a mobile-lab testing business, into broader commercial deployment.
Fish Audio, which began as a bedroom side project by a former Nvidia researcher, raised a $52 million seed round led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today to build voice as the default AI interface.
Seed-stage venture capital is concentrating in AI-native cybersecurity startups this year, as investors bet that AI-driven attacks require AI-native defenses rather than incremental upgrades to legacy security tooling.
AI proptech startup Dwelly raised $170 million -- $95 million in equity led by EQT Growth and General Catalyst, plus a $75 million debt facility from Trinity Capital -- to keep acquiring and automating UK residential lettings agencies.
A Value Add Pulse analysis finds Nvidia has taken direct equity stakes in at least two AI companies this week alone, on top of its chip-financing talks with OpenAI, raising the question of how much of the industry's demand Nvidia is now underwriting itself.
OpenAI and Anthropic alone accounted for 43% of all global venture funding in the first half of 2026, according to Crunchbase data on a record $510 billion half-year total.
Defense-tech venture funding has already topped $14.6 billion in the first five months of 2026, surpassing the sector's entire 2025 funding record.
Princeton spinout Thea Energy won a $20 million ARPA-E SCALEUP award to build the first domestic production line of modular high-temperature superconducting magnets for stellarator fusion reactors.
Nvidia is investing several billion dollars in Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence and giving the AI safety-focused lab access to its next-generation Vera Rubin chip platform, valuing SSI at $32 billion.
Antares raised a $470 million Series C -- $370 million equity plus $100 million debt -- co-led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital, after achieving initial criticality on its Mark-0 compact nuclear reactor under a DOE pilot program.
Nuclear startup Antares raised a $470 million Series C to build small modular reactors for US military bases, part of a Pentagon program racing to bring domestic reactors online by 2028 under a Trump executive order.
GlossGenius rebranded as Genius AI and raised $44 million in Series D funding led by Lux Capital at a $1.15 billion valuation, expanding from beauty-industry scheduling software into agentic tools for the broader in-person service economy.
