Every venture round we've covered on Value Add Pulse -- seed through mega-rounds, with the VC take on each.
More than 40% of seed and Series A investment in 2026 has gone into rounds of $100 million or more, led by AI infrastructure, chip and robotics startups including River AI's $1.2 billion round and Xpeng Robotics' $900 million raise.
Hubble Network raised a $200 million Series C at a $1.6 billion valuation and opened its satellite-to-Bluetooth network to any BLE device, expanding a service that already reaches more than 90 million devices through partners like Life360 and Tile.
MoonPay agreed to acquire SEC-registered broker-dealer North Capital for more than $60 million in an all-stock deal, gaining broker-dealer and alternative trading system licenses to expand into tokenized securities.
Bird.com, the Amsterdam-founded communications platform formerly known as MessageBird, secured a $450 million JPMorgan-backed debt financing and unveiled an Agentic Harness letting AI agents send messages, place calls and manage email natively on its network.
Boulder-based Enveda Biosciences raised a $311 million Series E led by Catalio Capital Management at roughly a $2 billion valuation, funding its AI platform that mines natural compounds for new drug candidates.
TEKEVER, the Portugal-founded, UK-headquartered drone and autonomous-systems company, raised a $580 million Series D at a $6.4 billion valuation, nearly five times its valuation from earlier this year.
CoreWeave completed an upsized $4.2 billion offering of 2.875% convertible senior notes due 2033, well above its original $3 billion target, spending roughly $566 million on capped-call hedges to limit future equity dilution.
Cyera raised a $400 million extension to its Series G from Goldman Sachs Alternatives, holding its $12 billion valuation flat from June as the data-security company builds out AI agent monitoring.
Baselayer raised a $35 million Series A led by M13 to launch identity verification for AI agents transacting with financial institutions, extending a fraud-prevention network that already covers more than 2,300 banks and payments companies.
HighLife raised more than $90 million co-led by Andera Partners and Sofinnova Partners to fund a US pivotal study of its transcatheter mitral valve system and accelerate its European commercial rollout.
Heidi Health raised $340 million -- $100 million in equity plus $240 million non-dilutive from General Catalyst -- valuing the AI clinical-scribe company at $900 million as it expands into clinical decision support.
Binance invested $100 million in Circle Internet Group, buying shares at a 5% discount with a two-year lock-up, and signed a new five-year agreement to expand USDC distribution across Binance's global user base.
Go.AI raised an $85 million Series A led by Updata Partners to expand on-premises, examiner-ready AI infrastructure for banks, credit unions and other regulated industries, and says the business is already profitable.
Snorkel AI raised a $350 million Series E co-led by Insight Partners and Section 32 at a $3.5 billion valuation, nearly triple its mark from 17 months ago, as its data-as-a-service revenue run rate crossed $375 million.
Firecrawl, the open-source web-data extraction startup used by more than 1.5 million developers, raised a $75 million Series B led by Smash Capital and launched Alexandria, a unified data interface meant to feed AI agents.
Confido raised a $55 million Series B led by Insight Partners to expand its AI platform automating finance, trade-spend and demand-planning workflows for consumer packaged goods brands like Olipop and Dude Wipes.
Mirendil, the self-improving-AI startup founded by two ex-Anthropic researchers three months ago, is reportedly in talks with Kleiner Perkins and Andreessen Horowitz to raise up to $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation.
Verda, the Helsinki-based AI cloud company formerly known as DataCrunch, raised $189 million led by Emergence Capital and said it is now valued at more than $1 billion.
Three distinct capital-stack bets on small-business insurance -- Angle Health's $600M round, Luzern Risk's $45M raise, and the previously covered Corridor seed -- landed inside the same week.
Three new funds closed this month with a combined $1.53 billion in fresh capital -- Intrepid's $525M AI fund, Matter's $450M hardtech fund and Temporal's $550M round -- all narrowly focused rather than generalist bets.
Sprive raised a $10 million Series A led by Wealth Club, Active Partners and Rank Ventures to grow its cashback-funded mortgage-overpayment app, which now supports £42 billion of UK mortgages for 567,000 users.
Spiro secured an additional $18 million in debt financing from the Africa Go Green Fund, taking AGG's total commitment to $36 million, to expand electric-motorcycle and battery-swap infrastructure in Uganda and Rwanda.
Paymob raised a $35 million pre-Series C co-led by Mubadala and the EBRD to expand its MENA payments platform, as its Gulf revenue grew sevenfold in 18 months and now accounts for roughly half of total revenue.
Temporal Technologies raised a $550 million Series E (announced September 14) at a $12.55 billion valuation led by Lightspeed, as demand for durable execution infrastructure grows alongside longer-running agentic AI workloads.
Amber Electric raised a €49 million Series E led by Morgan Stanley Investment Management's 1GT climate strategy to expand its automated home-battery and energy-retail model from Australia, where it holds over 50% share, into Europe and the US.
Adaptive raised a $30 million Series B led by Tidemark to expand its AI-driven construction accounting platform, which now runs financial workflows for more than 750 construction companies.
Pulse's funding tracker shows a noticeably lighter week for AI mega-rounds after weeks of multibillion-dollar infrastructure raises, with fresh capital instead spreading across smaller, narrower bets like a $25M SMB insurance brokerage.
Beijing-based Xingyun Integrated Circuit raised nearly RMB 800 million (~$110 million) in a round led by battery maker CATL's investment platform Puquan Capital, adding a well-funded entrant to China's crowded race to build domestic large-model inference chips.
Corridor raised a $25 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures to build an AI-native health insurance brokerage for businesses with 1 to 100 employees, a segment traditional brokers often deprioritize.
Rainmaker raised a $100 million Series B led by NOA VC, Upfront Ventures, DCVC and Lowercarbon Capital to scale its drone-based cloud seeding operation, pitching precipitation enhancement as an answer to data center water fights.
Matter Venture Partners, founded by former Kleiner Perkins partners Wen Hsieh and Haomiao Huang, closed a $450 million Fund II to back early-stage hardtech startups in semiconductors, robotics and energy.
Intrepid Growth Partners, founded by former CPP Investments CEO Mark Machin, closed its debut fund at $525 million (announced September 14) to back growth-stage AI founders, with backers including Temasek and Abu Dhabi's investment authority.
HEO, a Sydney-based space intelligence startup, raised $25 million in Series B funding backed partly by Australia's National Reconstruction Fund to expand its 'flyby' satellite imaging network into geostationary orbit.
Noetive emerged from stealth with a $41 million seed round led by Eclipse. The company pairs self-improving AI with multi-modal sensing pods to build what it calls an 'intelligence of record' for the physical economy -- manufacturing, logistics, energy and data centers.
OpenAI projects it will burn through $278 billion in cash by 2030 funding its compute buildout, even as it holds early talks with investors on a new round that could value the company above $1.2 trillion.
Angle Health, an AI-native health insurer built for small businesses, raised $600 million combining a $200 million Series C and a $400 million secondary tender offer, valuing the company at $2.7 billion and led by Vitruvian Partners.
Vantora, the venture builder formerly known as UP.Labs, raised more than $100 million from Silversmith Capital Partners -- its first outside capital -- to keep building AI-native startups exclusively for single corporate partners.
London-based Mantic raised a $25 million seed led by Radical Ventures after its AI forecasting system competed with human forecasters at the 2026 Metaculus Cup, with Balderton, M12 and Thinking Machines Lab also participating.
Beijing-based AI computing-chip unicorn EVAS Intelligence raised nearly RMB 2 billion (~$280M) at a roughly RMB 15 billion (~$2.1B) valuation, from more than 20 investors including SMIC-linked Zhongxin Juyuan.
Crusoe's $3.9B raise and Bain Capital Ventures' $1.6B 'post-AGI' fund landed in the same 24 hours, and both are the same bet: the compute and services layer under AI is where the money is actually going now.
A stealth-mode Chinese LLM startup founded in February by a Tsinghua University professor has quietly reached a $1.4 billion valuation after raising $400 million across three rounds, including from Tencent.
Crusoe's $3.9B raise and CoreWeave's roughly $6B combined debt-and-equity push this week total nearly $10B, against Pulse's own tracker showing $129.9B across 347 startup deals over the past 17 weeks.
LvlUp Ventures reviewed 25,000 seed-stage applications over the past year and found distribution architecture and learning velocity now matter more to investors than the product-team-pitch formula that used to be sufficient.
Watney Robotics raised an $80 million Series A co-led by Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures as Meta tests its dual-arm robots against ABB and Kinova hardware inside live data centers in Iowa and Ohio.
OpenAI's prospective $1.5T round and Anthropic's prospective $2T IPO would together add close to $1.7 trillion in paper valuation versus their last priced rounds -- in the same week.
Chinese robotics-chip maker D-Robotics closed a $400 million Series C led by Mirae Asset, with Meituan and government-backed funds participating, in what's described as China's largest robotics funding deal in four years.
Nex raised more than $150 million in Series E debt and equity funding co-led by Baillie Gifford and BAI Capital as its motion-based Nex Playground console crossed 1 million units sold.
Crusoe's AI data-center buildout tripled its valuation to $30.9B in under a year, with Nvidia, Founders Fund and three sovereign-linked funds among the backers of the initial close.
Luzern Risk, an AI-native captive insurance manager formerly known as XN Captive, raised a $45 million Series B led by Insight Partners to speed up how quickly custom captive insurance programs can be launched and run.
CoreWeave is raising up to $3.5 billion via convertible notes due 2033 and opened a 35 million-share ATM program, pushing toward an investment-grade credit profile to fund its AI data-center buildout.
Bain Capital Ventures closed its largest fund yet, built around backing startups that sell AI-completed work itself rather than the software tools underneath it.
Comp AI closed a $34 million Series A led by Roo Capital and Grand Ventures to expand its agentic compliance platform into continuous cybersecurity monitoring, after 15x year-over-year ARR growth.
The Fed's first rate hike since 2023 knocked the Dow down 630 points, but the week's venture data shows AI-adjacent megarounds barely slowed -- a split worth watching closely.
Mazama Energy closed an oversubscribed $135 million Series B led by Centaurus Capital and Doerr Capital, with ConocoPhillips, Shell Ventures and returning backer Khosla Ventures, to drill three miles into superheated rock for round-the-clock power.
Shenzhen-based D-Robotics closed a $400 million Series C led by Mirae Asset to expand its Sunrise chip line and software platform for AI robots.
Vishal Sikka's four-month-old enterprise AI startup Hang Ten Systems has raised $85 million total after a $53 million extension led by Temasek's Xora.
OpenAI is negotiating a fresh funding round that could value the company at up to $1.5 trillion -- roughly double its $730 billion mark from March -- as Sam Altman pushes back on an IPO.
Bain Capital Ventures closed its eleventh flagship fund at $1.6 billion, 14% larger than its predecessor, betting on AI agents as the primary driver of a coming 'post-AGI' economy.
Fortell, backed by Founders Fund and Thrive Capital, has raised $163 million and reached a $740 million valuation building AI hearing aids meant to isolate speech from noise in real time.
Arcee AI closed a $150 million Series B at a pre-money valuation above $1 billion, betting enterprises will pay to run open-weight models instead of renting closed frontier APIs.
