H1 2026 Round-Up

The half in numbers

The first half of 2026 was the largest half-year for venture capital ever recorded. Crunchbase counts $510bn of global investment: $305bn in the first quarter, the largest quarter on record, followed by $205bn in the second, the second-largest. For scale, the whole of 2025 — itself a record year — drew $440bn.

The total is less interesting than its shape. Four of the five largest venture rounds ever recorded closed in the first quarter. Roughly $250bn of first-quarter capital went to US companies, and about two-thirds of second-quarter capital did the same. Concentration compounded at the top: sixteen billion-dollar rounds took 53 cents of every second-quarter dollar, and the two frontier laboratories alone — OpenAI and Anthropic — took 43 cents of every dollar deployed worldwide across the half.

The prints

OpenAI’s $122bn close on 31 March, at an $852bn post-money valuation, is the largest venture round ever raised. Its structure is as notable as its size: Amazon committed $50bn, of which $35bn is contingent on a listing or on the company reaching a stated technological milestone; Nvidia and SoftBank each put in $30bn; and $3bn came from individual investors through bank channels — the first time a frontier laboratory has raised from retail inside a private round. The company disclosed roughly $2bn of monthly revenue at the close.

Anthropic printed twice. A $30bn Series G on 12 February at $380bn post-money was followed fifteen weeks later, on 28 May, by a $65bn Series H at $965bn — the mark that put its valuation above OpenAI’s for the first time. Between the two rounds, company-disclosed run-rate revenue moved from $14bn to $47bn. xAI closed a $20bn Series E at $230bn on 6 January; a month later the company was folded into SpaceX at an attributed $250bn. Waymo’s $16bn, at $126bn post-money, is the largest financing of an autonomous-vehicle company on record.

Below the headline prints, the frontier broadened. Seven of the second quarter’s sixteen billion-dollar rounds went to frontier laboratories beyond the big two: DeepSeek, StepFun and Moonshot AI in China, Ineffable Intelligence in the United Kingdom, and Prometheus and Isomorphic Labs in the United States, per Crunchbase. Anduril doubled its valuation to $61bn on revenue that doubled to $2.2bn in 2025; Kalshi doubled to $22bn five months after its prior round, disclosing annualised traded volume up from $52bn to $178bn over six months.

Who wrote the cheques

The syndicate lists tell a story the totals cannot. Sovereign capital was present in nearly every mega-print: GIC co-led Anthropic’s Series G; QIA and MGX appear in both that round and xAI’s Series E; Mubadala participated in Waymo’s. Suppliers and customers bought in as strategics — Nvidia in both OpenAI and xAI, Cisco in xAI, and, most strikingly, the memory manufacturers Micron, Samsung and SK hynix in Anthropic’s Series H. Wall Street arrived in the smaller prints too: Morgan Stanley and ARK joined Kalshi’s round.

Two structural features are worth recording. First, contingent capital has arrived at the late stage: $35bn of Amazon’s $50bn commitment to OpenAI is conditional on a listing or a technological milestone — capital committed against outcomes, not merely price. Second, OpenAI’s $3bn raised from individual investors through bank channels moved the retail bid inside the private perimeter for the first time at this scale. The marginal buyer of late-stage AI, a question this desk has examined before, is increasingly not a venture fund: it is a sovereign, a supplier, or the customer itself.