Global investment in startups reached $297 billion in the first quarter of 2026, breaking all records, according to new data from Crunchbase. This is a significant 2.5x increase over the $118 billion raised in the previous quarter. This single quarter's sales exceeded the full year of global VC activity prior to 2019.
This unprecedented surge was fueled by just four mega-deals, each of which was a record-breaker in its own right.
Last month, OpenAI announced that it had raised $122 billion, bringing its current valuation to $852 billion. This surpassed the record for the largest funding round in history, also held by OpenAI, when the ChatGPT maker raised $40 billion a year ago.
In the same quarter, its main rival Anthropic also raised $30 billion at a valuation of $380 billion. This funding effectively makes it the third largest VC round in history. Two other big deals in the quarter included xAI's $20 billion raise and Waymo's $16 billion raise.
These four rounds raised a total of $188 billion, accounting for more than 63% of total funding in the quarter.
Without them, funding might appear to follow a more typical trajectory, but anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. For example, investors and founders say seed-stage AI startups are attracting more funding and higher valuations at earlier stages than in the past.
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