114 Series A rounds of $100m or more logged so far in 2026

Global startups have raised at least 114 Series A rounds of $100m or more so far in 2026, according to Crunchbase data. The firm says that is the highest annual total in years and on course to beat the all-time peak.

The group has taken in around $33bn between them, on Crunchbase's count. At least 12 of those rounds were worth $500m or more.

So the $100m Series A is no longer the ceiling. For a sizeable minority of companies it is the floor.

The cause is largely one sector. More than 70% of the $100m-plus Series A rounds went to AI-focused startups, Crunchbase reports.

The largest examples show the scale. Crunchbase cites a $1.2bn round for River AI, a Silicon Valley platform for training and serving custom models, and $900m for Xpeng Robotics, a Chinese developer of AI-enabled humanoid robots.

That mirrors the wider market. Crunchbase estimates venture and growth funding to AI startups reached $394bn in the first half of 2026, roughly 77% of all investment capital, though most of that went to later-stage deals.

American companies took roughly half of the jumbo Series A rounds and half the money: about 62 deals worth around $15bn, according to the same data. Crunchbase says that too is on track for a record.

Early-stage money is nonetheless less concentrated than the market as a whole. More than three-quarters of global seed-to-growth funding in the first half went to US companies, a figure Crunchbase attributes largely to megarounds for Anthropic and OpenAI.

Crunchbase offers three explanations beyond AI itself: large investors are sitting on unusually big reserves, exit multiples reward ambition rather than modesty, and investors currently agree with each other about which sectors, business models and teams they want.

That last point is the one a seed founder should read twice. Agreement among investors means the perceived leader in a category absorbs the capital, and everyone else is priced against a company that just raised nine figures on a pitch deck.

The practical effect is a reset reference point. A $6m Series A is still a Series A, but it now sits in the same dataset as a $1.2bn one, and the partner reading your deck has seen both this year.

Two consequences follow from the numbers as reported. If you are not in AI, you are competing for the under-30% of jumbo rounds, and the comparison set for a conventional round is smaller and quieter than the headlines suggest.

And if you are in AI, the money is there but it is chasing a short list. Crunchbase's framing is that investors are piling into perceived early-stage leaders, which is a polite way of saying second place in a hot category is a harder raise than first place in a cold one.

The dataset includes rounds explicitly announced as Series A plus financings with Series A characteristics that were not labelled as such, Crunchbase notes. That caveat matters when you are benchmarking your own round against it.