Every venture round we've covered on Value Add Pulse -- seed through mega-rounds, with the VC take on each.
CADDi raised $114 million in a Series D round that values the Chicago- and Tokyo-based manufacturing data platform at $1.18 billion, officially making it a unicorn as it pushes further into North America.
Sling Therapeutics closed a $123 million Series C led by Forbion to fund a Phase 3 trial of linsitinib, an oral pill positioned as a more convenient alternative to injectable treatments for thyroid eye disease.
Three unrelated capital events -- two new unicorns and an $8 billion acquisition financing -- landed the same day the FTC chair warned AI labs against seeking both new regulation and antitrust protection at once.
Value Add Pulse tallied the capital raised across three separate September 15 announcements -- Profound, Thatch and Rocket Lab's Iridium financing -- against the prior week's eleven largest US venture rounds.
Dutch chip startup Euclyd raised more than $231 million in a Series A led by Samsung, with former ASML chief executive Peter Wennink joining as chairman to help commercialize a memory-centric architecture aimed at AI inference.
Inspiren raised $70 million in a Series C round valuing the ambient-sensor senior-living startup above $500 million, its largest round yet as it expands an AI platform that predicts falls before they happen.
Thatch, an ICHRA marketplace that lets employers fund individual health plans instead of one group policy, raised a $108 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation as revenue grew nearly sevenfold over the past year.
AI interactive-content startup Flam raised a $40 million Series B led by QED Investors with backing from Shah Rukh Khan and Datadog's Olivier Pomel, pushing past its 2021 mixed-reality roots toward AI-generated brand content.
SoftBank refinancing its OpenAI bridge loan with bonds and margin loans, not IPO proceeds, is more evidence that debt -- not venture equity -- has become the financing engine of the AI infrastructure buildout.
Value Add Pulse tallies three numbers from the past week's AI infrastructure coverage -- Oracle's $664B cloud backlog, Microsoft's 38GW power target, and the Pentagon's proposed $5B loan to Fluidstack -- that together price the buildout's capital intensity.
Value Add Pulse totaled the nine largest US venture rounds of September 5-11 and found $8.7 billion committed, with three deals at $1 billion or more.
Anthropic agreed to pay Rum Group -- the Rumble-owned infrastructure company that hosts Truth Social and counts Peter Thiel and JD Vance among its early backers -- $13.7 billion over six years for GPU capacity at a Georgia data center still under construction, days after publicly calling for the industry to slow down.
Teravolt is converting aluminum smelters, retired thermal plants and bitcoin mines into AI data centers, arguing a megawatt-hour earns roughly four times more running GPUs than running a smelter.
Startup lawyer David Siegel argues the standard four-year vest with a one-year cliff manufactures litigation, and says VC tolerance for equity held by departed founders has collapsed from as much as 20% to about 2.5%.
Betting markets moved sharply after Senate Republicans released a Clarity Act draft with more than 120 changes, including new ethics provisions barring the president and Congress from sponsoring digital assets for payment, ahead of a September 15 cloture vote.
Stockholm's Tandem Health raised €86.5 million in a Series B led by EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund to build an AI co-pilot for clinical documentation, betting European healthcare fragmentation favors a local-native builder over Abridge or Microsoft's Nuance.
Fortaegis closed an oversubscribed $50M Series A led by Serendipity Capital to commercialize silicon-level security for AI accelerators, satellites, defense hardware and autonomous machines.
Stockholm-based Tandem Health raised $100 million in Series B funding led by EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund, its first healthtech investment, bringing Tandem's total funding to $160 million as it expands from AI documentation into a full clinic operating system.
Y Combinator's September 2026 Demo Day produced nine startups VCs flagged as buzziest, spanning floating nuclear data centers, jet-powered counter-drones, brain-cell computing and humanoid robots, with valuations investors described as more grounded than recent batches.
Hong Kong fintech Qupital raised $300 million in combined Series C equity and asset-backed financing led by M Capital with MUFG participation, pushing cumulative loans processed past $9.5 billion as it eyes an IPO.
Six companies -- The Boring Company, Cognition, Positron AI, Mach Industries, Harvey, and Ayar Labs -- have absorbed more than $8 billion in the first ten days of September, almost all of it into physical AI infrastructure and applied AI.
The Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital is negotiating what would be its largest loan ever -- not to build a new AI data center, but to shore up the supply chain behind the ones already under construction.
Mecka AI, which pays crowdsourced workers to record everyday tasks for training humanoid robots, is nearing a Sequoia-led round at close to a $500 million valuation.
Khosla Ventures is opening its first office outside Sand Hill Road, a 14th Street outpost in New York set to open this fall as the city overtakes the Bay Area in tech headcount.
The year-old embodied-AI startup, led by former Huawei autonomous-driving executives, raised an Angel+ round led by Temasek's Vertex Ventures to fund its full-size humanoid, KAI.
A $225 million secondary sale priced the optical-interconnect chipmaker above $5 billion, a 33% markup from its March valuation, as it races to reach high-volume manufacturing.
Robotics startups have raised roughly $23 billion in 2026 while defense tech funding hit a record $17.4 billion, led by megadeals at Saronic, Quantum Systems and Anduril.
Fleet management software company Motive secured more than $1.3 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, one of four US companies to raise $1 billion or more in a single week.
Elon Musk's tunneling venture The Boring Company raised $3 billion in a Series D led by the UAE, valuing the company at $23 billion -- a fourfold increase from 2022 -- to fund more than 150 kilometers of new tunnels across the Emirates.
Personal AI assistant Instinct is in talks to raise as much as $1 billion at a valuation up to $10 billion, weeks after its last round, as compute costs strain its free-to-use product.
Italy's Bending Spoons agreed to acquire whiteboard-turned-AI-workspace Miro at a $1.355 billion enterprise value, its second major collaboration-software acquisition in weeks.
Boston growth-equity firm Volition Capital raised $950 million for its largest fund yet, targeting profitable, bootstrapped software companies as LPs worry about AI disrupting SaaS.
AI inference-chip startup Positron AI raised $875 million at a $5 billion valuation, more than quadrupling its value in seven months as it races to tape out its memory-heavy Asimov chip on TSMC's N3P process.
Pinegrove Venture Partners closed its Strategic Investors Fund XII at $1.5 billion across early- and scale-stage strategies, an oversubscribed vehicle giving institutional LPs concentrated exposure to a curated set of venture managers.
Thrive Capital, Collaborative Fund and a Griffin Gaming managing director are all redirecting venture money and personal capital into sports franchises and trading cards as a hedge against startup-market froth.
Defense-tech drone maker Mach Industries raised an additional $600 million, doubling its valuation to $3.7 billion just three months after its original Series C, an eightfold jump in a little over a year.
Alibaba is leading a $300 million investment in UniPat AI, an AI model-testing and benchmarking startup founded by a former Alibaba intern, valuing the company at $2.5 billion with Tencent also participating.
Twenty-nine companies crossed billion-dollar valuations in August, adding roughly $63 billion in aggregate value, with AI software and semiconductors leading and 16 of the 29 based in the US.
AI coding startup Cognition raised more than $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, nearly doubling its mark from four months ago as its annualized revenue grew from $492 million to $900 million.
Legal AI startup Harvey raised $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, nearly doubling its mark in nine months, with the fresh capital earmarked for building its own AI models rather than relying solely on frontier labs.
Clay's AI go-to-market platform closed a $115 million Series D at a $7.1 billion valuation led by Wellington, confirming the $7 billion pre-money mark reported as a rumor eleven days earlier.
Lightfield raised a $47 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz to build an AI-native CRM that automatically structures customer data from email, calendar, calls and Slack, positioning itself against Salesforce and HubSpot.
Legal AI startup Harvey raised $550 million at a $15.5 billion valuation, nearly doubling in nine months across two rounds while building its own open-weight model instead of depending solely on OpenAI or Anthropic.
Rightway Healthcare closed a $155 million round disclosed only through an SEC filing, with no press release, named lead investor, or valuation -- unusually quiet for a company that has taken nearly $400 million since 2017.
TRM Labs raised fresh capital from existing backers at a $2 billion valuation, doubling its worth six months after a $70 million Series C, as the blockchain-intelligence firm expands into AI-driven crime detection.
Solstice Oncology launched with a $225 million Series A led by RA Capital Management to advance porustobart, a second-generation CTLA-4 immunotherapy licensed from Harbour BioMed, into two Phase 2 cancer trials.
AI-native RIA platform Savvy Wealth closed a $100 million Series C at a $600 million valuation led by Ryan Smith and Ryan Sweeney's Halo Fund, after growing recruited assets past $4 billion this year.
Besxar is testing orbital semiconductor manufacturing pods called Fabships across a dozen SpaceX Falcon 9 booster flights, betting that the vacuum of space can produce cleaner wafers than Earth-based clean rooms.
Listen Labs walked away from a signed $125 million Series C term sheet at a $1.5 billion valuation to pursue a sale to Salesforce reportedly worth around $2 billion; Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire the company on September 29 without disclosing the price.
A handful of 2026's hottest companies are raising follow-on rounds four to six months apart at 2x-plus step-ups, a pace with almost no historical precedent outside this cycle.
Bluecore Energy closed an oversubscribed $50 million seed round just two months after emerging from stealth, adding to a $10 million pre-seed as it develops floating small modular reactors for ports and AI data centers.
Poseidon Aerospace raised a $60 million Series A led by TQ Ventures ahead of the first test flight of its uncrewed cargo aircraft, Egret, expected by the end of the year.
Poseidon Aerospace raised a $60 million Series A led by TQ Ventures ahead of the first test flight of its uncrewed cargo aircraft Egret, adding to an $11 million seed round closed last year.
The Exploration Company, a Munich- and Bordeaux-based spacecraft maker, raised a $450 million Series C led by Atomico, Bessemer and the Scaleup Europe Fund to fund its Storm rocket engine and Nyx reusable capsule program.
Forus raised a $150 million Series C led by Bain Capital Ventures at a $3 billion valuation, tripling its worth months after its Series B, as its AI agents automate prescription prior authorization for providers nationwide.
Moonwalk Biosciences closed an oversubscribed $70 million Series B to advance an adipose-targeted RNA interference therapy for obesity toward its first human trial, bringing total funding to roughly $127 million since its 2024 launch.
BrainChild Bio closed $116 million in Series A financing to fund a pivotal Phase 2 trial of its CAR T-cell therapy for DIPG, a rare and near-uniformly fatal pediatric brain tumor.
Stoke Space and Mistral raised a combined $4.2 billion this week while Sapien and NavigateAI, two real vertical-AI companies with paying customers, raised a combined fraction of that -- the same split Pulse has tracked in AI money all year.
Stoke Space's $1 billion round joins Castelion's $1.05 billion and Atoms' $1.7 billion as capital-intensive physical-hardware startups now command the round sizes and speed that used to be reserved for software.
Forus, an AI network that automates prescription access between doctors, pharmacies and payers, raised $150 million at a $3 billion valuation -- roughly triple its mark from four months ago.
