NeuralStackNorth American venture investment reached unprecedented levels in the first half of 2026, as enormous financings for artificial intelligence companies pushed U.S. and Canadian startup funding to $392 billion, according to Crunchbase data. The total dwarfed anything recorded previously and extended a record-setting run that began in the first quarter.
Investment in the second quarter totaled $137.2 billion, making it the second-most expensive quarter on record behind the opening three months of the year. Unlike a broad-based expansion in deal activity, however, the surge was driven by a small number of unusually large rounds. Deal counts remained well below recent-year highs.
Anthropic was the quarter’s dominant fundraiser, securing $65 billion at a $965 billion post-money valuation. The financing included a $50 billion May round led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, alongside corporate-led investments of $5 billion from Amazon and $10 billion from Google. Anthropic later filed confidentially for an initial public offering.
Late-stage and technology-growth funding totaled about $101 billion in the second quarter, the second-highest quarterly tally both in the past five quarters and in the historical record described by Crunchbase. Defense technology company Anduril Industries also added a major transaction, raising $5 billion in a Series H round led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
Early-stage investment also strengthened, reaching just over $31 billion, nearly twice its year-ago level and about 15% above the first quarter. Yet the number of early-stage deals fell to its lowest point in five quarters. Prometheus, a physical-AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos, accounted for more than 40% of the category’s quarterly funding with a $12 billion financing.
Other notable early-stage rounds included $700 million for Hark, which is developing what it calls “personalized intelligence,” $500 million for Flourish, an AI system based on the human brain, and $400 million for robotics startup Generalist AI. Seed funding moved in the opposite direction: roughly $4.9 billion went to seed and angel rounds, down 15% from the previous quarter and 27% from a year earlier.
AI captured about 80% of all venture investment across stages in the second quarter. Funding for AI categories nearly tripled from a year earlier, although it declined from the first quarter, when OpenAI’s $122 billion financing set a record. Anthropic, Prometheus and Anduril accounted for a majority of the AI-focused funding in the quarter.
Why this matters
The figures show that the apparent strength of the startup market is increasingly concentrated in companies viewed as AI leaders, rather than spread evenly across the venture ecosystem. Record totals can therefore coexist with falling deal counts and declining seed investment, leaving companies outside the largest AI financings competing for a much smaller share of available capital.
The funding boom was accompanied by an exceptional exit environment. SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest initial public offering ever in June, and its recent market capitalization was described as roughly $2.1 trillion, making it the sixth-most valuable American public company. SpaceX also followed the IPO with the acquisition of Cursor, characterized in the source as a record-setting startup M&A deal.
With Anthropic pursuing a potential IPO and investors continuing to channel extraordinary sums toward AI infrastructure, applications and robotics, the next phase of the market will test whether today’s concentration produces a broader wave of company formation and exits or remains dependent on a handful of headline financings.