Analysis
The eleven largest disclosed venture rounds of September 5-11 total roughly $10.8 billion, per Crunchbase's tally and our coverage of each deal. Four cleared $1 billion. Ten of eleven went to US companies. The week that followed produced no US round above $50 million.
The deals, with what Pulse reported at the time:
“Prior coverage.”
- The Boring Company -- $3B Series D at $23B (UAE sovereign money, a16z, Sequoia, Valor): tunnel boring, Bastrop, Texas, founded 2016. Partly earmarked for 150km of UAE tunnels. Prior coverage.
- Cognition -- $2B Series E at $48B (Accel, a16z, Founders Fund, General Catalyst): Devin software agent, San Francisco, founded 2023. Highest valuation of the week. Prior coverage.
- Motive -- $1.3B growth equity (General Catalyst): AI fleet management, San Francisco, founded 2013. Prior coverage.
- Stoke Space -- $1B Series E at $10B (Point72 Ventures, Spark, Y Combinator): reusable Nova rocket, Kent, Washington, founded 2019. Competitors: SpaceX, Rocket Lab. Prior coverage.
- Suniva -- $835M growth round (Electron Capital, OIC, Rubric Capital): US solar cell manufacturing, Norcross, Georgia.
- Mach Industries -- $600M Series C at $3.7B (Ribbit, Sequoia): unmanned aircraft, Huntington Beach, founded 2022 by Ethan Thornton. Competitors: Anduril, Shield AI. Prior coverage.
- Harvey -- $550M Series H at $15.5B (Lightspeed, a16z, Sequoia): legal AI, San Francisco, founded 2022. Competitors: Legora, Robin AI, CoCounsel. Prior coverage.
- Fab2 -- $500M Series A at $3.7B (Fundomo, Maverick Silicon): semiconductor fabrication tooling, California and Kentucky. The largest Series A of the week by a wide margin.
- Positron -- $500M Series C at $5B (NEA, Qatar Investment Authority): AI inference hardware, Reno, Nevada. Competitors: Groq, Cerebras, Etched. Crunchbase and our earlier reporting differ on round size; this is the Crunchbase figure.
- Celero Communications -- $275M Series C at $3B (Atreides, CapitalG, Valor): high-speed data transfer for AI data centers, Laguna Beach, California.
- Encoded Therapeutics -- $275M Series F (GV, Arch, Venrock): genetic medicines for neurological disease, South San Francisco.
Composition is the finding, not the total. Seven of eleven are physical: tunnels, rockets, solar cells, drones, fab tools, inference silicon, optical interconnect. Two are software agents, one is biotech. The market that funded application-layer wrappers in 2023 now writes its largest checks for things that need factories, and those dollars convert to revenue in years, not sales quarters.
