Global venture funding hits record $510B in first half as AI boom accelerates

Startups worldwide raised a record $510 billion in the first half of 2026, according to a new report out today from market intelligence company Crunchbase Inc.

The figure was more than investors put into venture deals across all of last year, when the total came to $440 billion. The first half also set a funding record, beating the previous record of $375 billion set in the second half of 2021.

To the surprise of absolutely no one, artificial intelligence drove the boom, with the bulk of venture capital going into a small group of companies. OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC alone accounted for $217 billion, or 43% of all startup funding in the first half. That level of concentration in two frontier labs is unprecedented, though Crunchbase noted the boom has spread well beyond a few foundation model developers into AI infrastructure, defense, robotics and healthcare.

The pace eased in the second quarter. Investors still put $205 billion into more than 5,000 startups, the second-biggest quarter on record, though that trailed the first quarter’s $305 billion. The first quarter stands as the largest three-month stretch Crunchbase has tracked.

Anthropic drove much of the quarter on its own. The company raised $65 billion, close to a third of all global venture funding for the period and became the most valuable private company on the Crunchbase Unicorn Board. It passed OpenAI on the leaderboard after Space Exploration Technologies Corp. exited via its initial public offering.

AI companies took more than 70% of all startup capital in the quarter. A year earlier, the share was just under half. U.S. startups again pulled in most of the money, about two-thirds of the total, though that was down sharply from 83% in the first quarter.

Mega-rounds accounted for most of the money. Sixteen companies raised billion-dollar rounds in the second quarter, totaling $108.6 billion, or 53% of the quarter’s funding. Seven were frontier labs, among them the China-based foundation companies DeepSeek, StepFun and Moonshot AI, U.K.-based Ineffable Intelligence Ltd. and the U.S.-based labs Prometheus Inc. and Isomorphic Labs Inc. Eight companies in the group were U.S.-based, with Asia and Europe holding four each.

Exits returned in force, producing the strongest liquidity market since the 2021 boom. The largest IPO ever for a venture-backed company and the largest startup acquisition ever both landed in the quarter and both involved SpaceX. The rocket company went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation, raising $75 billion and less than a week later confirmed its intent to acquire Anysphere Inc., maker of the AI coding tool Cursor, for $60 billion.

A total of 32 companies went public at values above $1 billion in the quarter. After SpaceX, the next two largest listings were inference chipmaker Cerebras Systems Inc. and quantum computing company Quantinuum Inc. Acquisitions ran hot too. Buyers scooped up 24 venture-backed companies at $1 billion or more, worth a combined $113 billion. No quarter on record has produced more exit value from mergers and acquisitions.

Funding also rose across every stage.

Late-stage deals saw $134 billion raised in the second quarter, a drop from the first quarter but up 141% from the same period in 2025. Early-stage funding grew even faster, more than doubling year-over-year.

Some 91 companies raised Series A and B rounds of $100 million or more in the quarter, a sign that the market’s biggest deals are reaching younger startups. Seed funding hit $12 billion, though the gap between a few large rounds and the broader pool of traditional rounds kept widening. Of that total, $2.8 billion went to rounds of $100 million and over, while $5 billion went to rounds of $10 million and under.

The record leaves the market lopsided. An unprecedented share of first-half capital flowed to just two companies, a reminder that the current cycle is centered on the biggest players in the frontier AI race.

But funding grew across every stage, the public markets have reopened and billion-dollar deals expanded beyond foundation labs. If the return of liquidity through IPOs and M&A holds, 2026 may be remembered not only for record private investment but also as the start of a cycle in which that investment and a working exit market feed one another.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons