Crunchbase

Venture funding into fintech startups climbed nearly 23% year over year in H1 2026, even as deal count fell more than 25%, Crunchbase data shows, a sign that investors are writing fewer, but much larger checks into the sector as they focus on areas such as wealth management, financial infrastructure and enterprise automation. We take a look at the numbers.

The wind-downs at PayPal and Fidelity International may look like a retreat, but the data points to a concentration of power at the top of the market that smaller funds will feel first, writes guest author Steve Brotman of Alpha Partners.

Payments giant Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have teamed up to make an offer to buy troubled PayPal in a deal valued at more than $53 billion, Reuters reported Wednesday.

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.

Despite attention-grabbing AI mega-seed rounds, historical data shows that very large first financings rarely produce venture-scale returns because high entry valuations limit investor upside. Instead, argues guest author Ellie McDonald, the strongest venture outcomes have typically come from capital-efficient startups that raised modest early rounds.

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.

Mexico's startups led the LatAm pack in Q2 — by a wide margin. The country's startups raised $944 million in the second quarter, up 131% compared to $409 million in last year's Q2, and up 136% from the $401 million raised in this year's first quarter, per Crunchbase data. For comparison's sake, that's almost as much as Latin American startups as a whole raised in the second quarter of 2025.

In this interview with Crunchbase News, Docter also discussed how AI is reshaping SaaS and why he doesn't believe the business model is headed for extinction. He also shared why he thinks distribution may ultimately separate the winners from the losers among AI startups, and more.

While 2026 has shown encouraging signs, with Black-founded startups raising approximately $643 million by late May, the strongest quarter since mid-2022, the improvement was driven largely by a handful of unusually large financings. James Norman and Sean Green, co-founders of Black Operator Ventures share their thoughts on how Black founders can close the Series A gap.