Amazon joins with a multiyear AWS Trainium deal; total funding tops US$207m for video-native foundation models Marengo and Pegasus
Venture capital financings of US$100m or more in a single close, now concentrated in US AI infrastructure and accounting for most global VC dollars on fewer than 3% of deals.
full dossier ›Nvidia, Vista, General Catalyst and Taiwan's Pegatron join; the open-model inference platform runs on Chinese-origin systems DeepSeek, Kimi and GLM and plans a 50x capacity build
Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins co-lead with Nvidia; a ~20-person team from Anthropic, xAI, DeepMind and OpenAI is building AI that automates AI research
Prosus leads the French health-insurance platform's Series G as ARR crosses €800m and the company hits profitability in France; Index Ventures, Teachers' Venture Growth and Dara Holdings co-invest
US-led category of startups building autonomous software systems that execute multi-step enterprise tasks, now the fastest-growing venture segment globally as of mid-2026.
US-based neocloud and inference startups building the compute layer for AI drew more than US$9bn in venture capital in 2025-2026, concentrated outside the major hyperscalers.
Global category of startups deploying AI into specific industries, from US legal and healthcare to India's sovereign model stack, attracting record venture capital as of 2026.
Global private capital deployed into drug development and health-technology companies, concentrated in the United States and Europe, funding the pipeline from which most new medicines emerge.
The US-led cluster of companies training frontier AI from scratch, raising more than US$375bn in early 2026, reshaping corporate competition, export controls, and global geopolitics.
The global financing stage, dominated by US crossover funds and sovereign wealth funds, that sets valuations and gates which technology companies reach IPO scale.
The third-largest US startup ecosystem, built on aerospace heritage and Silicon Beach venture capital, now the leading US hub for defense-tech and commercial space startups.
Robotics and hardware startups globally attracted US$18.8bn in venture funding through mid-2026, driven by embodied AI and humanoid robot makers in the US and China.
The earliest institutionalized stage of startup financing, global seed rounds set deal and valuation records in 2025 as AI mega-seeds stretched the stage's definition.
The sequence of named investment rounds that sets valuations for private companies globally, from first seed check to billion-dollar unicorn and the corrections in between.
Altimeter, Conviction and Spark lead the largest-ever pure-play inference infrastructure round; 20x revenue growth in a year and 87 clusters across 18 clouds position Baseten as the production layer beneath AI applications
Anduril, Shield AI and Saronic account for $8.75bn of the total; the Pentagon is now actively encouraging VC participation and the sector is consolidating fast
Iconiq, GIC and Ontario Teachers lead the spend-management platform's Series F; annualised revenue tops $1bn as companies lean on Ramp to control AI budgets
22-year-old MIT dropout Ethan Thornton's defense startup lands Series C led by Infinite Capital, Sequoia and Khosla; a 115,000 sq ft Huntington Beach factory and five weapons platforms underpin the jump from $470m
Thrive Capital and a16z lead the largest-ever defense-tech private round; revenue doubled to $2.2bn in 2025 and the Army's $20bn Lattice counter-drone contract underpins the raise
SoftBank leads a Series C for the Pittsburgh startup building the Skild Brain, a foundation model that can retrofit any robot without task-specific retraining