the rounds
| # | Company | Raised | Round | Valuation | Investors | Sector | Date | Story |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | PrometheusThe AI venture co-founded by Jeff Bezos closed a $12B Series B co-led by JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock, the single largest round and highest valuation in 2026's unicorn cohort, taking total funding to $18.2B. Reports tie Prometheus to AI for engineering and manufacturing, the physical industries where models have lagged software. Balance-sheet institutions leading a round this size signals that applied, industrial AI has moved from thesis to allocation. | $12B | Series B | $41B | JPMorgan Chase & BlackRock (co-lead) | Applied AI (engineering & manufacturing) | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 2 | HelsingHelsing, the German defense-technology company, raised a $1.8B Series E at an $18B valuation to scale its AI-driven battlefield software and autonomous drones, one of the largest European defense-tech financings on record. The raise landed the same day Quantum Systems closed a $1.2B Series D, underscoring how much venture capital is now flowing into militarized AI as European governments rearm and prioritize sovereign capability. | $1.8B | Series E | $18B | — | Defense AI / autonomous drones | July 14, 2026 | ↗ |
| 3 | JoulentEnergy infrastructure for AI data centers | $1.75B | Strategic minority (35% stake) | $5B post-money | National Grid Ventures; Engine No. 1-backed | AI power & data centers | 2026-07-01 | ↗ |
| 4 | Shield AIMaker of the Hivemind autonomy software that flies aircraft and drones in GPS- and comms-denied environments; the round is part of a broader $2.25B package and marks a roughly 140% valuation jump in a year as defense tech becomes a durable venture category. | $1.5B | Series G | $12.7B | — | Defense autonomy | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 5 | BasetenServing AI models fast and cheaply as a platform | $1.5B | Series F | up to $13B | Led by Altimeter, Conviction, Spark Capital; IVP, Greylock, Battery participating | AI inference | 2026-06-22 | ↗ |
| 6 | Quantum SystemsAutonomous reconnaissance drones (Munich) | $1.2B | Series D | $8B | Co-led by Blackstone, Airbus, Advent | Defense tech | 2026-07-02 | ↗ |
| 7 | SambaNova SystemsPalo Alto AI-chip maker closed the first tranche of a $1B Series F led by General Atlantic at an $11B valuation, just five months after its last mega-round. The raise funds SambaNova's push to be a credible second source for AI inference against Nvidia, betting that efficient, high-throughput model serving plus a full software stack can pry loose a slice of hyperscaler compute spend. | $1B | Series F | $11B | General Atlantic (lead) | AI chips (inference) | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 8 | KalshiRegulated prediction-market exchange | $1B | Series F | $22B | Led by Coatue | Prediction markets | 2026-07-03 | ↗ |
| 9 | Together AITraining + serving infrastructure for open-source models | $800M | Series C | $8.3B post-money | Led by Aramco Ventures | Open-model AI cloud | 2026-07-01 | ↗ |
| 10 | RampSpend management with real revenue and operating leverage | $750M | Series F | $44B | Led by Iconiq, GIC, Ontario Teachers' | Fintech | 2026-06-04 | ↗ |
| 11 | Neko HealthOwn-built full-body scanning hardware and clinics (Daniel Ek); funds US launch | $700M | Series C | ~$7B | Led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, co-led by O.G. Venture Partners; Atomico, General Catalyst, Lakestar returning; Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum, BDT & MSD new | Preventive health | 2026-07-15 | ↗ |
| 12 | SupabaseOpen-source backend powering the AI app boom | $500M | Series F | $10.5B post-money | Led by GIC; Accel, Coatue, Felicis, Stripe, Salesforce Ventures participating | Developer tools | 2026-06-04 | ↗ |
| 13 | Impulse SpaceIn-space propulsion and orbital transfer vehicles | $500M | Series D | — | Led by 137 Ventures and Banner VC | Space | early June 2026 | ↗ |
| 14 | Proxima FusionMunich stellarator-fusion startup; one of Europe's largest Series A rounds, taking total funding past €650M including grants toward a demonstration reactor | €411M | Series A | — | XTX Ventures, Google, RWE | Deep tech / fusion energy | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 15 | HelionChasing the first commercial fusion power plant | $465M | Series G | $15.5B post-money | Led by Thrive Capital | Fusion energy | 2026-06-30 | ↗ |
| 16 | General IntuitionWorld models trained on action-labeled gameplay video | $320M | Series A | $2.3B | Led by Khosla Ventures; Jeff Bezos among backers | AI world models | 2026-07-01 | ↗ |
| 17 | MercuryBanking platform for startups and small businesses; sits on partner banks and sells the software layer, cards, payments, credit and finance tooling | $200M | Series D | $5.2B | — | Fintech / startup banking | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 18 | Upscale AIUpscale AI, a Santa Clara startup building the switching and interconnect fabric that stitches thousands of GPUs into a single training cluster, raised a $190M Series A extension led by Premji Invest, bringing total financing to about $500M at a $2B valuation. The size of an 'extension' Series A is the tell: sophisticated capital thinks the AI bottleneck has moved from chips to the network feeding them, since an idle GPU waiting on the wire is wasted capital at data-center scale. Upscale AI sells into the same hyperscalers and neoclouds buying the accelerators, but into a brutal neighborhood wedged between Nvidia's networking bundle and Broadcom's merchant silicon. The valuation is a promise; reference deployments and utilization benchmarks are what will pay for it. | $190M | Series A extension | $2B | Premji Invest (lead) | AI data-center networking infrastructure | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 19 | Tripo AITripo AI, which builds generative 3D technology that turns text prompts and images into usable 3D assets and is pushing toward world models, raised about $147M in a Series A extension backed by gaming company 4399.com and others. The round is one of the larger checks into 3D-focused generative AI and reflects a clear rotation of capital past text and image models toward the harder, less saturated modalities that unlock spatial industries, games, robotics simulation, and AR/VR. A gaming backer is the tell: games are the market that will pay for generative 3D first and stress-test it hardest, and the gap between a striking render and a production-ready, riggable asset is exactly where these products succeed or fail. | ~$147M | Series A extension | — | 4399.com (among backers) | Generative 3D & world models | early July 2026 | ↗ |
| 20 | AlpacaAlpaca raised $135M in equity led by Peak XV, with major participation from Elefund and returning investors Opera Tech Ventures (BNP Paribas Group's VC arm) and Unbound, alongside roughly $300M in debt financing primarily from Payward (Kraken's parent) and BMO, for a $435M total package. No new valuation was disclosed; January's $150M Series D led by Drive Capital had valued the company at $1.15B. The money funds what Alpaca calls agent-first brokerage and API-first prime brokerage infrastructure, letting institutions reach traditional equities and onchain markets through one integration with AI agents as first-class callers. Alpaca reports monthly active API users up nearly 4x in six months, revenue doubling year over year for three consecutive years, and more than $1.5B in assets under custody for the underlying stocks backing tokenized equities. | $135M | — | — | Peak XV (lead); Elefund, Opera Tech Ventures (BNP Paribas), Unbound | Brokerage infrastructure / tokenized equities | July 16, 2026 | ↗ |
| 21 | 8090 Solutions8090 Solutions, the Chamath Palihapitiya-led startup that builds custom enterprise software using coordinated teams of AI agents under human-led oversight, raised $135M in a round led by Salesforce. The strategic lead is the signal: the company that defined enterprise SaaS is validating agent-built software as a real market, and gives 8090 credibility and potential distribution into the largest CRM ecosystem. The model, agents for throughput and a human for judgment and sign-off, is the pragmatic middle path enterprises can actually buy. The thesis lives or dies on delivery metrics: cost per app, time to ship, and whether the output survives production. | $135M | — | — | Salesforce (lead) | Agentic enterprise software (AI-built apps) | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 22 | Prime IntellectDecentralized training that coordinates GPUs across many locations to train large models without a single co-located supercluster, an open-compute counter to the closed frontier clusters | $130M | Series A | — | Radical Ventures | AI infrastructure / decentralized training | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 23 | Norm AIEmbeds law into AI agents and, via affiliated AI-native firm Norm Law, sells legal outcomes on outcome-based pricing; agents increasingly supervise other companies' AI in regulated environments. Crosses into unicorn territory | $120M | Series C | $1.2B | Khosla Ventures (lead), Blackstone, Bain Capital Ventures, Craft Ventures, Coatue | Legal AI / agentic compliance | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 24 | TaktileDecision platform automating credit, risk and fraud calls for banks and fintechs | $110M | Series C | — | Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives | Fintech / risk decisioning | early July 2026 | ↗ |
| 25 | RunPodOn-demand, per-second GPU cloud for AI training and inference, aimed at developers priced out of hyperscaler capacity | $100M | Series A | — | Summit Partners | AI infrastructure / GPU cloud | late June 2026 | ↗ |
| 26 | Twelve LabsAI trained natively on video — search, summarize, reason over footage | $100M | Series B | $1B+ | Co-led by NEA, NAVER Ventures; Amazon participating | Video AI | 2026-07-04 | ↗ |
| 27 | ZerothHumanoid robotics startup Zeroth raised roughly $73.6M in a Series A led by Ant Group, one of the larger early rounds in a 2026 market pouring capital into physical AI. Ant Group anchoring the round puts a major Chinese fintech and AI player behind the bet that general-purpose humanoids, pairing foundation-model brains with actuators and sensors, are the next platform after chatbots. The check size reflects how capital-intensive the humanoid race is: mechanical engineering, power systems, and real-world AI must all work at once before revenue arrives. | $73.6M | Series A | — | Ant Group (lead) | Humanoid robotics (physical AI) | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 28 | SenraSenra, a wire-harness startup founded in 2023 by former SpaceX engineer Jordan Black, raised a $65M Series B to modernize the production of wire harnesses, the bundles of wires and connectors inside nearly every rocket, submarine, drone and defense vehicle. The craft is still done largely by hand on pegboards; Senra wraps it in software (its Amp platform builds a digital twin that guides technicians) plus in-house automation, and says it runs the only federally certified wire-harness training program. It makes about 1,000 harnesses a month across two factories and targets 10,000 a month in 2027. The round, a little over a year after a $25M first raise, is a bet on American reindustrialization and defense-industrial supply resilience. | $65M | Series B | — | Lowercarbon, Interlagos (co-leads); General Catalyst, Sequoia, a16z, Founders Fund | Defense manufacturing / wire harnesses | July 15, 2026 | ↗ |
| 29 | VeniceTwo-year-old Sheridan, Wyoming startup offering private, surveillance-free access to a wide range of AI models. The Series A sets a $1B valuation on the thesis that privacy is a durable wedge against model providers whose economics depend on retaining and profiling user data. | $65M | Series A | $1B | Dragonfly (lead) | Private AI | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 30 | OllamaOpen-source tool that runs open-weight LLMs locally with a single command; the round backs private, on-device inference as open models close the gap with cloud APIs. | $65M | Series B | — | Theory Ventures (lead) | AI infrastructure / local model runner | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 31 | PoeticPoetic raised a $50M Series A at a reported $500M valuation to build a new class of software it describes as learning like AI but running like code, aimed at the gap between rigid traditional programs and slow, non-deterministic large models. The rich early-stage multiple reflects the 2026 pattern of capital concentrating on the infrastructure and runtime layer that makes AI cheap and reliable to ship, rather than on another foundation model. The bet is that model-like adaptability at code-like cost is a fundable category, provided the traction is real. | $50M | Series A | $500M | — | AI infrastructure (adaptive software runtime) | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 32 | Bespoke LabsBuilds simulated environments where AI agents are tested and evaluated before production; a reliability layer for agents rather than another foundation model | $40M | Series A | — | Wing VC, Mayfield, The House Fund | AI agent infrastructure / evaluation | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 33 | Oxmiq LabsLicensable architecture fusing GPU, CPU and TPU (Raja Koduri) | $35M | Series A | — | Co-led by Fundomo, Samsung Catalyst Fund; MediaTek, Intel Capital participating | AI chips | 2026-07-02 | ↗ |
| 34 | LinqAlphaLinqAlpha raised $22M in a Series A to build agentic AI for market intelligence, gathering and synthesizing the filings, transcripts, news, and market data an investment analyst works across. The round fits the dominant July 2026 pattern of capital flowing to agentic AI in regulated, high-stakes financial workflows, where reliability and traceability matter more than raw model scale. The bet is that the durable value in AI is applied, trustworthy agents wired into a specific workflow rather than another foundation model. | $22M | Series A | — | — | Agentic AI (market intelligence) | July 2026 | ↗ |
| 35 | NetrisNetris, a Santa Clara networking company founded in 2018, raised a $15M Series A led by a16z to scale its NAAM platform (Network Automation, Abstraction, Multi-Tenancy), which gives AI cloud operators a single control plane and hardware-enforced multi-tenancy across Ethernet, InfiniBand, NVL72 scale-up and edge fabrics. It posted 800% ARR growth in 12 months across 35+ AI clusters (roughly 1M GPUs), holds an estimated 12% of neoclouds by cluster count, counts Lightning AI, Foxconn, TensorWave, Telus and HPE as customers, and is the first ISV validated by NVIDIA for AI network automation. Funds go to engineering, commercial hiring and a Singapore office. | $15M | Series A | — | Andreessen Horowitz (lead, Guido Appenzeller) | AI infrastructure / networking automation | June 25, 2026 | ↗ |
where the money is going
Across the $28.05B we've tracked, the concentration is unmistakable: Applied AI (engineering & manufacturing) ($12B), Defense AI / autonomous drones ($1.8B), AI power & data centers ($1.75B) lead the board. Investors are buying the shovels — power, inference and silicon — rather than the gold rush on top.
Only rounds we've covered and verified are listed — this is a curated tracker, not an exhaustive database. Raw data: JSON · CSV (free to cite with attribution).