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The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Largest Financings Went To Defense, Wearables, Energy And Security
Want to keep track of the largest startup funding deals in 2025 with our curated list of $100 million-plus venture deals to U.S.-based companies? Check out The Crunchbase Megadeals Board. This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out last week’s biggest funding deal roundup here. Startup investors kept up the busy dealmaking pace this week with a number of big rounds. Top among them was a $1.75 billion Series D for Saronic, developer of autonomous vessels. Other big funding recipients hailed from sectors including fitness wearables, energy tech, cybersecurity and AI infrastructure, among others. 1. Saronic, $1.75B, autonomous ships: Austin-based Saronic, a defense tech startup focused on autonomous sea vessels, raised $1.75 billion in Series D funding, bringing total funding to around $2.6 billion. Kleiner Perkins led the round, which set a $9.25 billion valuation for the company, more than double its Series C level in 2025. 2. Whoop, $575M, fitness wearables: Whoop, a provider of wearable fitness technology and a subscription platform that tracks physiological data, secured $575 million in Series G funding. Collaborative Fund led the financing,which set a $10.1 billion valuation for the Boston-based company. 3. Valar Atomics, $450M, nuclear energy: El Segundo, California-based nuclear energy startup Valar Atomics, raised fresh capital at a valuation of $2 billion, according to a Bloomberg article citing unnamed sources. The financing reportedly included $340 million in equity funding and $110 million in debt. 4. EnerVenue, $300M, battery technology: EnerVenue, a developer of grid-scale energy storage technology, says it closed on a $300 million extension of its Series B preferred round led by Full Vision Capital. The Fremont, California-based company also appointed a new chief executive officer, Henning Rath. 5. Tenex.AI, $250M, cybersecurity: Sarasota, Florida-based AI-enabled cybersecurity startup Tenex picked up $250 million in Series B funding led by Crosspoint Capital Partners. The company said it plans to use the funds to hire more than 250 people and supplying them with AI technology that makes them “ten times more efficient.” 6. Also, $200M, micromobility: Also, an electric mobility company spun out of Rivian, raised $200 million in a Series C round backed by Greenoaks, DoorDash, and Prysm Capital. The Palo Alto, California-based startup’s product lineup includes bikes, small autonomous EVs for deliveries, and associated gear. 7. Starcloud, $170M, space tech: Starcloud, a space infrastructure startup focused on building orbital data centers, secured $170 million in Series A funding led by Benchmark and EQT. The financing sets a $1.1 billion valuation for the Redmond, Washington-based company, making it the fastest Y Combinator alum to achieve unicorn status after demo day, which was 17 months ago. 8. ScaleOps, $130M, cloud infrastructure: New York-based cloud and AI infrastructure startup ScaleOps landed $130 million in Series C funding. Insight Partners led the financing, which set a valuation of over $800 million for the 4-year-old company. 9. Ambrosia Biosciences, $100M, biotech: Boulder, Colorado-based Ambrosia Biosciences, a developer of next-generation oral therapeutics for obesity and related cardiometabolic diseases, picked up $100 million in Series B funding led by Blue Owl, Redmile Group and Deep Track Capital. 10. OpenFX, $94M, money transfer: OpenFX, provider of a platform to move money across borders, secured $94 million in Series A funding from backers including Accel, Atomico, M13, Northzone and Pantera Capital. Methodology We tracked the largest announced rounds in the Crunchbase database that were raised by U.S.-based companies for the period of March 28-April 3. Although most announced rounds are represented in the database, there could be a small time lag as some rounds are reported late in the week. Illustration: Dom Guzman
This Is A Momentous Year For Early-Stage Unicorns
As global venture funding kicks off this year at record-setting levels, startup investors are also minting new early-stage unicorns at an unprecedented clip. A total of 47 seed- and early-stage companies joined the unicorn ranks in the first quarter of this year, per Crunchbase data. Barring a major slowdown, that puts 2026 on track to deliver the largest cohort of young unicorns to date. This year’s newcomers follow a good-sized 2025 cohort of early-stage companies that secured valuations of $1 billion or more as well. Per Crunchbase data, 59 hit this valuation milestone last year, up about 50% from 2024. Over the past 10-plus years, meanwhile, the number of new early-stage unicorns has fluctuated widely, from a couple dozen to more than 100, as charted below. Recent early unicorns are all about AI Virtually all of the early-stage unicorns minted in the past couple quarters are AI-focused. This includes several of the most heavily funded newcomers. Examples include Project Prometheus, the physical AI startup launched by Jeff Bezos, Thinking Machines Labs, the foundational AI company co-founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, and Nscale, a London-based AI infrastructure unicorn that has raised over $5 billion. All this represents the opposite of a surprising development, given that 80% of global venture funding this past quarter went to AI. Additionally, later-stage AI companies are famously securing unheard-of private market valuations, with OpenAI and Anthropic recently valued at $852 billion and $380 billion, respectively. While we’re not seeing those kinds of numbers for more recently minted early-stage unicorns, several are hitting post-money valuations previously unheard of for such young companies. Thinking Machines Lab, valued at $12 billion for its first funding, is reportedly looking to secure a $50 billion valuation for its next round. And 2-year-old Reflection AI, which secured an $8 billion valuation late last year, is reportedly seeking fresh funding at a $25 billion value. Fastest climbers In addition to their high valuations, many newcomers to the early-stage unicorn club are also noteworthy for the speed of their ascents. Quite a few unicorns minted in the last 15 months were founded in 2025. And one — Advanced Machine Intelligence — was apparently founded just this year. For a broader view, we used Crunchbase data to aggregate some prominent examples of recently founded early-stage unicorns. By now, some of our early-stage unicorns have also already moved on to later stage. Nscale, for instance, closed a Series C this month. And residential backup power provider Base Power closed on $1 billion in Series C funding in October, just eight months after its Series B. Others are already close to securing new funding at Series C and beyond. Was this the peak? Given the new funding records set last quarter, and the blistering pace of early-stage unicorn creation, it’s worth considering whether this could be the peak for the ultra-high AI newcomer funding rounds and valuations. After all, public markets haven’t done well in recent weeks, and private markets have a history of following suit. For those of us who’ve followed startup funding ebbs and peaks for some time, it’s clear the current environment shares characteristics of a market top. By the same token, top performing tech startups have long demonstrated that doubters are often wrong. Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Exclusive: Miravoice, Builder Of An AI ‘Interviewer’ To Conduct Phone Surveys, Raises $6.3M
Miravoice, a startup using AI voice agents to conduct long-form phone surveys, has raised $6.3 million in a seed funding round, the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively. Unusual Ventures led the financing, which included participation from Neo, 25madison and angel investors from companies such as Ramp, PubMatic, Atlassian and Google. Miravoice has developed an AI interviewer that it says can conduct phone surveys and voice interviews for “precision data collection” without human interviewers. The surveys are long-form and quantitative, with some including more than 120 questions and lasting over 40 minutes. They span open-ended responses, numerical inputs, multiple choice questions, Likert scales and matrix questions. Danny D. Leybzon, Nishant Jain and Shreyas Tirumala, co-founders of Miravoice. (Courtesy photo) “Imagine talking to 100,000 people and instantly capturing what they know,” said CEO and co-founder Nishant Jain. “We make that as simple as creating a Google Form.” Voice interviews have long been the gold standard for rigorous data collection, but the costs and operational frictions of talking to people have made it more challenging, Jain contends. “Having to hire call centers made running quantitative research surveys infeasible for most organizations,” he said. Miravoice claims its agent is designed to be simple for anyone to deploy and not require technical backgrounds to operate. A user can build a questionnaire, spin up a phone number, and launch its trained voice agent “to get results back in hours rather than weeks,” Jain said. Multiple languages and ‘messy realities’ Miravoice is hyper-focused on precision, according to Jain. “Unlike other voice agent companies, we focus on structured conversations in which most questions are known in advance,” he explained. “Our customers know what information they want to get ahead of time, which is why we focus on extracting as much information as possible from respondents while minimizing bias.” He said Miravoice’s agent will ask every question in a survey without hallucinating responses. “And when the messy realities of human conversations arise, like interruptions or pauses, our AI can handle them seamlessly,” Jain said. The Miravoice interviewer is also multilingual by design, a capability that Jain believes is difficult for individual call centers to match. Using Miravoice’s agent is also cheaper than hiring and training call centers to conduct the same surveys, Jain contends. The platform can handle both outbound and inbound calls if a respondent calls back at any time of day. Idea and business model Miravoice was founded by Jain, Danny D. Leybzon and Shreyas Tirumala, three close friends from California who have known each other for more than a decade. The idea for Miravoice came from firsthand experience with the pains of scaling quantitative survey research in their roles as product managers and consultants. They realized that voice agent technology would be the way these calls would be handled in the future, “if agents were appropriately crafted for the unique needs of this market use case.” Miravoice has between 10 and 20 customers at varying stages — from paid pilot to production use cases — according to the company. Those customers include a variety of public-opinion survey organizations, market research firms, university departments and private companies across retail, entertainment and logistics. Its revenue model is usage-based billing: Customers pay for the time its AI agents are actually on the phone with respondents. Miravoice surpassed 100,000 calls made in 2025, per the company, and expects that number to be significantly higher this year. “What’s exciting about the space we’re operating in is that the scale of the number of calls our platform has to handle dwarfs most other voice agent use cases,” Jain said. “Our pilot projects alone are on the order of tens of thousands of calls: more than some voice agent companies’ monthly production workloads. In production, some of our customers expect to perform millions to tens of millions of calls each year, after full deployment and implementation.” Voice AI on the rise Lars Albright, general partner at Unusual Ventures, said his firm was impressed by the founding team’s technical acumen and product vision. In Albright’s view, Miravoice’s focus on precision data collection sets it apart from most other entrants in the voice agent market research space. “They’ve correctly identified that voice AI can streamline operations and time-to-insight for large-scale quantitative research studies,” he wrote via email. Another area where Miravoice distinguishes itself is its ease of use, he said. “Many voice agent platforms are geared towards technical audiences and software developers,” Albright said. “Miravoice was built from the ground up with simplicity in mind so that truly any team can use it. This is a step-function change in making AI voice agents for surveys as ubiquitous as web forms are today.” Indeed, voice AI startups have emerged as standouts in the vast AI space, attracting the attention of investors globally, according to Crunchbase data. Over the past two years, several voice AI companies have seen their valuations triple — a signal of accelerating market demand and perceived long-term worth. One example of a voice AI company that has seen a massive valuation jump is ElevenLabs, which allows creators, enterprises and others to use AI software to replicate voices in dozens of languages. The Brooklyn, New York-based startup went from achieving unicorn status with an $80 million Series B raise in January 2024 to being valued at about $3.3 billion one year later with a $180 million Series C co-led by Iconiq Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Then, in February of this year, it raised a $500 million Series D round led by Sequoia Capital at an $11 billion valuation. Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Exclusive: Anvil Robotics Raises $5.5M to Build ‘Legos for Robots’ Platform For Physical AI Teams
Anvil Robotics, an eight-month-old startup that aims to be the “Legos for robots,” has raised $5.5 million in a seed funding round, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively. Matter Venture Partners led the raise, which included participation from Humba Ventures, DNX Ventures, Superhuman founder Vivek Sodera, Spacecadet Ventures and Position Ventures. Anvil had previously raised $1 million in pre-seed capital from Matter in 2025. The San Francisco-based startup builds custom robots for businesses and describes itself as a hardware, software and manufacturing platform. Mike Xia and Vijay Pradeep, co-founders of Anvil Robotics. (Courtesy photo) Before starting Anvil Robotics last July, Mike Xia, CEO, and CTO Vijay Pradeep, spent six months talking to a variety of businesses. They concluded that physical AI teams in companies, big and small, were spending over six months piecing together various robot arms, cameras and open-source libraries “just to get a glued-together prototype.” “This isn’t a problem if you’re Tesla, or have nine-figure R&D budgets, and you custom design and build everything, including hardware and software,” Xia told Crunchbase News in an interview. “But for many companies, even well-funded teams, standing up a robotic system with all the sensors and tools and controls you need is a huge challenge that costs you both time and money.” So the pair started Anvil to fill that gap. “We support physical AI teams who don’t have $100 million, to make this industry much more accessible,” Xia said. Customers can go on Anvil’s site and “essentially build out what they want,” he added, using either prebuilt kits or customization. “They are very much like Legos,” Xia said. Anvil then ships the robots within 1 to 2 days via 2-day air freight. The company is able to do so because it has a significant presence in Taiwan, and is its own manufacturer, he said. (But more on that later.) Its robots are about the size of a middle-school-aged child, but big enough to do basic dextrous tasks. Anvil’s robots typically cost $5,000 to $10,000, but its least expensive model is just $1,900. “I think the pricing is going down to a point where researchers and individuals are able to afford this,” Xia said. “I think it’s going to make a really big difference with the community and we’ll see a lot more activity in people building physical AI applications.” Anvil started shipping robots in September and has so far delivered over 100 of them to customers globally. Open-platform approach Anvil competes with the likes of Universal Robots and Unitree Robotics but claims that it’s different from other startups in the space in a couple of ways. “Most are basically building toys for rich people,” Xia said. Anvil’s model stands out, he believes, because it’s an open platform, meaning that all of its robot designs are open-sourced. Most other startups, according to Xia, sell a proprietary design that gets customers “locked in hardware and software.” “If you work with Anvil, you’re not locked into a single vendor, plus you have large communities behind you,” he said. Also, as mentioned above, Anvil is an actual manufacturer, and it “controls the whole stack.” “We don’t outsource — we do this hard part ourselves,” he told Crunchbase News. “We buy each part and operate our own factory, which our customers can leverage.” Further, Anvil customers can choose where their components come from and how many to build. Historically, if a U.S. company has wanted to deploy a robot, it’s largely been dependent on hardware built in China. “If a business wants 10 robots made with Taiwanese or Japanese parts, we can do it,” Xia said. “I believe many companies will become more aware of supply chain risk and need this. Many robots today are made in China, and we’re not exactly on great terms [with the country]. Business growth Anvil won’t disclose hard revenue figures, but Xia noted that it has reached seven figures and that it has over 50 customers. That revenue mostly comes from hardware today, but the company plans to release more software, data tools and services, which should diversify its revenue base. Its customers are a varied bunch, with some “exciting” ones such as giant tech companies under NDA. Those they can talk about are a small chocolate factory based in Portland, Oregon; Nvidia’s GEAR lab, which is doing the humanoid research behind GR00T; and Path Robotics, which has raised more than $300 million to automate welding and industrial tasks. So far, all of its customers have been inbound, according to Xia. “It’s all been word-of-mouth, and a lot of it is community-driven,” said Xia, who added that he previously co-founded another startup called Lumina Industries and was formerly chief product officer at Voltage Park. A ‘robotics foundry’ Haomiao Huang, founding partner at Matter, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm has been investing “at the forefront” of physical AI “for some time.” “It quickly became clear that innovation on the hardware — the motors, actuators, sensors, systems, etc. — hasn’t kept pace with the rapid improvement in AI. They are still stuck in the same paradigms that powered the industrial robotics of decades past.” In his view, AI robots today are like “incredible brains trapped in weak, incapable bodies.” That’s where Anvil comes in. His firm incubated the startup to create a robotics foundry that could “move many companies forward.” “Behind great generations of products are foundational platform enablers,” Huang said, “and we founded Anvil to be to physical AI what AWS (Amazon Web Services) has been to SaaS and what TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) has been to chips.” The hard part of hardware is less about creating a great robot once, and more about making many great robots “over and over again,” Huang added. Anvil’s founders, he said, will be able to produce and iterate on hardware at “software-like speeds” and then deliver it at scale in production. Added Huang: “This is something unmatched.” Overall, robotics startup funding hit a record high last year, per Crunchbase data. Startups in the sector raised nearly $14 billion in funding in 2025, up from $8.2 billion in 2024, even topping the $13.1 billion raised in the peak venture funding year of 2021. Related Crunchbase queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Sector Snapshot: Venture Funding To Foundational AI Startups In Q1 Was Double All Of 2025
Funding to foundational AI startups, also known as generative AI companies or frontier labs, has doubled in the first quarter of 2026 so far compared to all of 2025, Crunchbase data shows. That funding is increasingly concentrated in a handful of foundational giants, including OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. In 2025 and early 2026, the market saw a shift to a small number of companies capturing a disproportionate share of global capital. The broad trend: After three years of declining or flat venture investment, global startup overall funding grew year over year in 2025, Crunchbase data shows. Notably, year-over-year funding growth concentrated in the largest rounds and in the AI sector. Roughly 50% of all global venture funding in 2025 went to companies in AI-related fields, making artificial intelligence the leading sector for funding, as it was for the past three years. Venture funding to AI overall reached $211 billion — up 85% year over year from $114 billion in 2024 — Crunchbase data shows. Funding to the AI sector in 2025 surpassed every year in the past decade, including the peak global funding year of 2021. The numbers: As of March 31, foundational AI startups had raised $178 billion across 24 deals, compared with $88.9 billion across 66 deals in all of 2025 in a 100% increase. That’s also significantly higher — 466.9% higher to be exact — than the $31.4 billion raised across 52 deals in 2024. By contrast, funding to foundational AI companies totaled just $23.2 billion in 2023 (a fraction of the size of OpenAI’s latest round) and a mere $1.4 billion in 2022. Noteworthy rounds Unsurprisingly, the two largest rounds in 2026 so far were raised by rivals OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) and Anthropic (maker of Claude). Last month, OpenAI revealed that it’s raising an additional $10 billion in funding for its record-setting $110 billion megaround announced in February, bringing the total fundraise for the San Francisco-based company to over $120 billion. On March 31, it was reported that the round actually reached $122 billion. Backers in the latest financing include Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw, MGX, TPG and T. Rowe Price. The first tranche of that round had already marked the largest venture funding deal of 2026 so far and the largest of all time, per Crunchbase data. Also in February, generative AI company Anthropic announced it had raised $30 billion in a massive Series G funding round led by GIC and Coatue, valuing it at $380 billion post-money. With that round, San Francisco-based Anthropic has now raised nearly $64 billion since its 2021 inception, per Crunchbase. The year kicked off with Elon Musk’s xAI, the generative AI startup known for its Grok chatbot and the parent company of X (formerly Twitter), securing $20 billion in Series E funding from a long list of venture and strategic investors. Founded in 2023, xAI has raised $42.7 billion in reported debt and equity funding to date, per Crunchbase data. Beyond the three largest generative AI giants, a smaller cohort of foundational AI startups are also raising significant sums of money. Advanced Machine Intelligence, a startup co-founded by computer science pioneer and former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun, in March raised $1.03 billion to develop “world models,” or AI designed to learn from and interact with the physical world. The funding for Paris-based AMI represented the largest seed round ever for a European startup and one of the region’s largest fundings for an AI startup overall, per Crunchbase data. Bezos Expeditions, Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital and HV Capital led the funding, which reportedly values AMI at $3.5 billion. After that, the next-largest raise so far is a $1 billion injection into World Labs, a San Francisco-based startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li that develops foundational models to generate and interact with the 3D world. Investors in that round included AMD, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity, Nvidia and Sea. Exits and IPOs The foundational AI sector is too young to have seen any significant exits yet. However, OpenAI in particular has done quite a bit of acquiring. OpenAI has already made six acquisitions in 2026, nearly as many as it made in all of 2025, according to Crunchbase data. Its latest purchase took place on March 19, when it announced plans to acquire Astral, a creator of open-source tools for software developers. This month, it also snapped up Promptfoo, an open-source tool for testing AI applications. Overall, the San Francisco-based company has acquired 17 companies in the past three years, Crunchbase data shows. Eight of those purchases were made in 2025, although it didn’t even start making acquisitions until April last year. Meanwhile, data shows that Anthropic has been far less acquisitive. So far this year, it has made only one known purchase, buying Vercept, a 2-year-old software development startup. In 2025, Anthropic made two known acquisitions: Humanloop, an LLM evaluation platform for enterprises, and Bun, a JavaScript runtime for developing and managing web applications. No foundational AI model company is currently public, though several are actively preparing to change that in late 2026 or sometime in 2027. The most likely candidates are the companies that have also raised the most capital: OpenAI and Anthropic. Toronto-based Cohere, founded by ex-Google researchers, is also another possibility. That startup last August raised $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation. Inovia Capital and Radical Ventures co-led the round, which included participation from AMD Ventures, Nvidia, PSP Investments, Salesforce Ventures 1 and others. The case of xAI is an interesting one. In early 2026, the company effectively merged its interests with SpaceX. As a result, the highly anticipated SpaceX IPO, expected in mid- to late-2026, will now be the primary vehicle for public investors to gain exposure to xAI’s foundational models. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Q1 2026 Shatters Venture Funding Records As AI Boom Pushes Startup Investment To $300B
Update: The data and charts in this report were updated at 11:30 a.m. PT on April 1, 2026, to reflect the latest data in Crunchbase for Q1 2026. The first quarter of 2026 was unlike any other for venture investment, driven by unprecedented spending on AI compute and frontier labs. Crunchbase data shows investors poured $300 billion into 6,000 startups globally in the quarter, up over 150% quarter over quarter and year over year. That marks an all-time high for global venture investment not approached by any other quarter on record. In fact, startup investment in the first quarter of 2026 alone totaled close to 70% of all venture capital spending in 2025. The quarterly sum also tops all full-year investment totals prior to 2018. Q1’s startup investment largely went to AI startups and disproportionately to a handful of U.S.-based companies in record-setting deals. Four of the five largest venture rounds ever recorded were closed in Q1 2026, with frontier labs OpenAI ($122 billion), Anthropic ($30 billion), xAI ($20 billion) and self-driving company Waymo ($16 billion) collectively raising $188 billion, or 65% of global venture investment in the quarter. Overall, AI shattered records last quarter, with $242 billion — 80% of total global venture funding in Q1— going to companies in the sector. The previous record was set in Q1 2025, when AI accounted for 55% of global venture funding. Table of Contents Valuation surge, capital concentration Along with the three major frontier labs and Waymo, another 10 companies raised funding rounds of $1 billion or more in Q1, in sectors spanning generative and physical AI, autonomous vehicles, semiconductors, data centers, robotics, defense and prediction markets. Those outsized rounds pushed overall startup valuations higher in Q1. The Crunchbase Unicorn Board added $900 billion in value during the quarter, marking the largest valuation bump in a single quarter. US above 80% U.S.-based companies raised $250 billion, or 83% of global venture capital in Q1, Crunchbase data shows. That’s up significantly from 71% in Q1 2025, which was already well above historical averages in the decade before 2024. The second-largest market globally for venture funding in Q1 was China, with $16.1 billion invested. The U.K. followed, with $7.4 billion invested. Both countries were up quarter over quarter and even more significantly year over year. Late-stage hike The Q1 funding surge was concentrated in late-stage funding, which reached $246.6 billion — up 205% year over year — across 584 deals. A total of $235 billion was invested in 158 late-stage companies that raised rounds of $100 million and more. Early stage up over 40% Early-stage funding totaled $41.3 billion across 1,800 deals, Crunchbase data shows. Funding was up marginally quarter over quarter but up 41% year over year from $29.4 billion. Much of that increase went to Series A rounds, Crunchbase data shows. Series B deals were down quarter over quarter but still up year over year. Seed funding up over 30% Seed funding totaled $12 billion, up 31% year over year, though the increase was entirely due to larger rounds, with deal counts falling 30% year over year to 3,800. IPO slowdown, M&A pick up Record venture investment in U.S. companies did not translate into a stronger IPO market in Q1. In fact, the U.S. market for new listings slowed in Q1 amid a broader stock market selloff in software, although China’s IPO market picked up. A total of 21 venture-backed companies exited globally above $1 billion in Q1. Thirteen of those were from China, four more from elsewhere in Asia, and four from the U.S. The largest IPO in Q1 was Japan-based PayPay, a fintech for mobile payments valued at $10 billion upon listing. Two foundation lab companies from China — Z.ai and MiniMax — debuted on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, each valued at more than $6 billion. While the IPO market was somewhat lackluster, startup M&A was strong in Q1 with exits cumulatively valued north of $56.6 billion, Crunchbase data shows. That marked the third-highest startup M&A quarter since the downturn of 2022. The largest M&A deals in Q1 were Savvy Games Group’s $6 billion planned acquisition of ByteDance’s gaming platform Moonton, and Capital One’s planned $5.15 billion acquisition of fintech startup Brex. Public pressure While frontier lab megarounds defined Q1 2026, a closer look at the data shows every startup funding stage grew last quarter, as did round sizes across the board. And unlike the cloud and mobile era, this cycle is also being built in the physical world, with massive capital flowing not just into software, but infrastructure, autonomous vehicles, robotics and manufacturing. Now, with startup valuations surging and a backlog of companies with unprecedented sums of private capital behind them, pressure is intensifying on the IPO markets to reopen in 2026. Related Crunchbase queries: Methodology The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data is as of March 31, 2026. Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year. Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price. Glossary of funding terms Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less. Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million. Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round. Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.) Illustration: Dom Guzman
The Largest Recent Seed Rounds Are All For AI Companies
The stereotypical seed-funded company may be a scrappy startup with a shoestring budget. But in the age of AI, that’s not where investors are concentrating their bets. Instead, recent months have served as a busy period for big commitments to seed-stage companies that are short on operating history and long on ambition. To illustrate, we used Crunchbase data to cull a list of the largest seed rounds of the past six months 1. Globally, at least 12 companies within these parameters pulled in rounds of $100 million or more. Physical AI is leading theme A majority of top seed funding recipients operate at the intersection of AI and the physical world. This includes the largest recent fundraiser, Paris-based Advanced Machine Intelligence, which raised $1.03 billion in a March seed round backed by a long list of prominent venture firms, individual investors and strategic backers. The startup is developing AI models that learn abstract representations of real-world sensor data and make predictions. Unconventional AI, meanwhile, is operating at the intersection of AI and energy. The San Francisco company secured a $475 million seed round in December to develop energy-efficient silicon circuits that demonstrate similar non-linear dynamics to biological neurons. Also up there is Periodic Labs, which is applying AI to science and experimentation, with goals including automating materials design in areas like semiconductor manufacturing, transportation and power grid engineering. The San Francisco company raised $300 million six months ago. China-based startups have also recently landed large seed rounds tied to physical AI. This includes Lingchu Intelligence, developer of an AI platform for robotic device development that simulates physical world environments, and Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, a developer of AI robotic technology. Humans and AI AI startups haven’t forgotten about humans either. One example is Merge Labs, a startup co-founded by Sam Altman that raised $252 million in an OpenAI-led financing earlier this year. The San Francisco company is focused on applying AI advancements to brain-computer interfaces, Humans&, the second-largest seed recipient, is a bit harder to categorize. The Silicon Valley startup, which raised $480 million in January, is focused on foundational models “centering around people and their relationships with each other.” A new era for seed In addition to spotlighting investors’ growing enthusiasm for AI, the latest batch of jumbo seed round recipients also demonstrate changing dynamics around how capital is allocated at the earliest stage of company formation. The general trend points to fewer deals and larger average seed round sizes. While the majority of seed-stage deal counts still occur for rounds $5 million and under, that percentage has trended down over time. Meanwhile, larger and outlier seed rounds of $10 million and above have climbed from 2% of deals in 2018 to 9% over that time. Seed rounds of over $100 million — once exceedingly rare — are also more commonplace, with 27 such deals announced globally since the beginning of 2025, per Crunchbase data. Of course, it’s too soon to say if such large checks written at such a nascent startup stage will prove worth it in hindsight. For now, it’s certainly at least a boon to the seed-stage companies at the receiving end, which have the rare opportunity to iterate highly ambitious missions without the added burden of having to do it all on a shoestring budget. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: A Varied Week For Big Deals, Led By AI And Defense
Want to keep track of the largest startup funding deals in 2025 with our curated list of $100 million-plus venture deals to U.S.-based companies? Check out The Crunchbase Megadeals Board. This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out last week’s biggest funding deal roundup here. The pace of large-scale dealmaking picked up some this week, led by OpenAI’s disclosure that it raised another $10 billion to add to its record-setting megaround announced last month. Other big financings went to startups and growth-stage companies in sectors including defense tech, enterprise AI, autonomy and even laundry. 1. OpenAI, $10B, foundational AI: OpenAI is raising $10 billion in additional funding for its record-setting megaround announced in late February, reportedly bringing the total fundraise to the San Francisco-based company to over $120 billion. Backers in this latest financing include Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw, MGX, TPG and T. Rowe Price. 2. Shield AI, $2B, defense tech: San Diego-based defense tech unicorn Shield AI said it secured $2 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation. The round consists of $1.5 billion in Series G funding led by Advent International and JPMorgan Chase along with $500 million in preferred equity financing backed by Blackstone. Part of the proceeds will help pay for the planned acquisition of Aechelon Technology, a defense software company whose technology is used to train pilots and test advanced aircraft and autonomous systems. 3. Cambridge Mobile Telematics, $350M, transportation safety: Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a telematics and AI company focused on enabling safer mobility, picked up $350 million in a new financing led by The Rise Fund and Allianz X. Founded in 2010, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company has raised over $850 million to date, per Crunchbase data. 4. (tied) Harvey, $200M, legal tech: Harvey, the fast-growing provider of AI-enabled tools for law firms and in-house legal teams, closed on $200 million in fresh financing at an $11 billion valuation. GIC and Sequoia Capital led the round, which brings total funding to 4-year-old San Francisco-based Harvey to around $1.2 billion. 4. (tied) eMed, $200M, healthcare: eMed, a provider of GLP-1 programs for employers that counts Tom Brady as chief wellness officer and backer, said it raised $200 million in new funding. Aon Consulting led the round, which set a $2 billion plus valuation for the Miami-based company. 6. Xona, $170M, satellite tech: Xona secured a $170 million Series C round led by Mohari Ventures Natural Capital. The funds will go to scaling satellite production for a planned constellation of next-generation navigation satellites. Founded in 2019, Burlingame, California-based Xona has raised over $320 million to date. 7. Cents, $140M, laundry tech: Cents, a provider of software and payments technology for the laundry industry, secured $140 million in Series C funding led by Sumeru Equity Partners. The New York-based company said the round represents “the largest single software investment in the laundry vertical to date.” 8. Qualified Health, $125M, AI health tools: Palo Alto, California-based Qualified Health, developer of an enterprise AI platform for health systems, locked up $125 million in Series B financing led by New Enterprise Associates. 9. (tied) DashO, $110M, data observability: Dash0, an agentic observability platform, announced it closed on $110 million in Series B funding led by Balderton Capital. Founded in 2023, the New York-based company has raised over $154 million to date. 9 (tied) Performance Drone Works, $110M, drones: Huntsville, Alabama-based Performance Drone Works, a startup that designs, engineers and manufactures drones for defense and law enforcement, secured over $110 million in Series B funding led by Ondas. Methodology We tracked the largest announced rounds in the Crunchbase database that were raised by U.S.-based companies for the period of March 21-27. Although most announced rounds are represented in the database, there could be a small time lag as some rounds are reported late in the week. Illustration: Dom Guzman