Joanna Glasner

This week, most of the largest U.S. startup funding rounds centered around the sector one would suspect: artificial intelligence. Beyond that, the next-biggest area for startup funding was biotech.

Startup exits valued at $1 billion or more are now more numerous than at any point since the 2021 market peak, Crunchbase data shows.

U.S. startups announced sizable funding rounds at a steady clip during a truncated holiday week, with energy and AI leading the way.

In the first half of this year, investors poured $15 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for companies in Crunchbase cleantech, EV and sustainability-focused categories. That puts funding on track to slightly exceed the 2025 tally, which was the lowest in several years.

Overall, investment in U.S. and Canadian startups totaled a staggering $392 billion for the first half of 2026, per Crunchbase data, dwarfing anything we've seen before.

To get a more expanded sense of how busy startup backers spent their quarter, we put together several rankings for active investors. These include active venture backers, lead investors, highest spenders and prolific seed dealmakers.

The first quarter of 2026 was a more robust period for funding than the second. Privacy and cybersecurity startups pulled in $4.4 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing in Q2. That marked a decline of around 30% from prior quarter and year-ago levels, with round counts falling by a similar magnitude, as charted below.

Overall, investors poured $42.8 billion into startup funding rounds across all of Asia in Q2 2026, per Crunchbase data. That's by far the highest quarterly total in more than three years, as charted below.

We put together a snapshot of recent startup funding tallies and trends for World Cup finalists Spain and Argentina. While neither accounts for a particularly large share of global or even regional investment, both have an intriguing pipeline of recently funded companies. Here's what we found.

It was not a holiday week on the funding front, as a raft of largely AI-focused companies closed big rounds. The largest of these was a $1.5 billion financing to enterprise AI startup Fireworks AI, and a Series D for meal and delivery provider Wonder . The week also included some big financings for enterprise tech, food delivery, drones and construction automation.