This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out last week’s biggest funding deal roundup here.

While no billion-dollar rounds led this week’s list, we nonetheless saw a variety of startups in industries ranging from semiconductors to aerospace to biotech raise sizable rounds. The week’s biggest deal was $400 million for SiFive, a semiconductor startup challenging incumbent with chip designs built on an open rather than proprietary standard.

1. , $400M, semiconductors: San Mateo, California-based semiconductor startup SiFive raised a $400 million Series G round led by . SiFive makes the blueprints used by companies such as to develop their own internal chip designs, on an open standard called RISC-V. CEO Reuters he expects the raise to be SiFive’s last funding round before an IPO, though didn’t say when an offering would take place.

2. , $200M, aviation: Hermeus, an El Segundo, California-based startup developing autonomous military aircraft, raised $200 million in equity in a -led round. The company, which is developing what it says will be the fastest unmanned defense aircraft, also raised $150 million in debt as part of the round, which pushes its valuation to $1 billion. Other investors in the deal include , and

3. $137M, biotechnology: San Diego-based Sidewinder, a biotech startup developing cancer drugs to target difficult-to-treat tumors, raised a $137 million Series B led by and . The company is developing next-generation cancer drugs called antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs, which are designed to act like “guided missiles” by using engineered antibodies to deliver toxic payloads directly into tumor cells. The company said its new funding will be used to push its lead drug candidates into clinical trials.

4. , $125M, AI infrastructure: Palo Alto, California-based Aria Networks raised $125 million in a -led Series A funding round. The company develops an AI-driven networking platform that monitors, analyzes and optimizes data center performance.

5. , $111.7M, aerospace: Starfish Space, a Seattle-based startup developing and manufacturing autonomous space vehicles that perform in-orbit, satellite servicing missions, raised $111.7 million. The Series B round was led by , and . Starfish’s spacecraft dock to satellites already in orbit to service and reposition them. They can also remove defunct satellites and debris from space.

6. (tied) , $100M, biotechnology: Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Stipple Bio raised a $100 million Series A round to advance its precision cancer therapies. The round was led by , and . Stipple aims to develop highly targeted cancer treatments that selectively attack cancer cells while minimizing damage to healthy tissue.

6. (tied) , $100M, health insurance: led the $100 million Series E for Chapter, a New York-based startup offering a Medicare navigation platform that provides advisory services for seniors seeking health coverage. Other investors include ​​, and 1.

8. , $85M, fintech: Modus, a Philadelphia-based startup, raised $85 million in a -led seed and Series A round. The startup describes itself as a tech‑enabled audit platform that acquires CPA firms and equips them with AI‑driven audit tools to deliver higher‑quality audits. and also participated in the deal.

9. , $80M, medical devices: and led the $80 million Series C for Menlo Park, California-based Endovascular Engineering, also called E2, which has developed a device called Hēlo for the treatment of venous thromboembolism, or VTE. The company secured clearance for Hēlo in December.

10. , $80M, biotechnology: Boston-based Life Sciences, which aims to develop drugs to promote longevity and find treatments for age-related diseases, says it raised $80 million in Series D funding. The company says it will use the funding to advance human trials of its cellular rejuvenation therapy, called ER-100, which aims to make older, damaged cells act younger again. Investors in the round were not disclosed. The company has previously been backed by , , , and.

Methodology

We tracked the largest announced rounds in the Crunchbase database that were raised by U.S.-based companies for the period of April 4-10. Although most announced rounds are represented in the database, there could be a small time lag as some rounds are reported late in the week.

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led the financing, which included participation from , and angel investors from companies such as , , and .

Miravoice has developed an AI interviewer that it says can conduct phone surveys and voice interviews for “precision data collection” without human interviewers. The surveys are long-form and quantitative, with some including more than 120 questions and lasting over 40 minutes. They span open-ended responses, numerical inputs, multiple choice questions, Likert scales and matrix questions.

“Imagine talking to 100,000 people and instantly capturing what they know,” said CEO and co-founder . “We make that as simple as creating a Google Form.”

Voice interviews have long been the gold standard for rigorous data collection, but the costs and operational frictions of talking to people have made it more challenging, Jain contends.

“Having to hire call centers made running quantitative research surveys infeasible for most organizations,” he said.

Miravoice claims its agent is designed to be simple for anyone to deploy and not require technical backgrounds to operate.

A user can build a questionnaire, spin up a phone number, and launch its trained voice agent “to get results back in hours rather than weeks,” Jain said.

Multiple languages and ‘messy realities’

Miravoice is hyper-focused on precision, according to Jain.

“Unlike other voice agent companies, we focus on structured conversations in which most questions are known in advance,” he explained. “Our customers know what information they want to get ahead of time, which is why we focus on extracting as much information as possible from respondents while minimizing bias.”

He said Miravoice’s agent will ask every question in a survey without hallucinating responses.

“And when the messy realities of human conversations arise, like interruptions or pauses, our AI can handle them seamlessly,” Jain said.

The Miravoice interviewer is also multilingual by design, a capability that Jain believes is difficult for individual call centers to match.

Using Miravoice’s agent is also cheaper than hiring and training call centers to conduct the same surveys, Jain contends. The platform can handle both outbound and inbound calls if a respondent calls back at any time of day.

Idea and business model

Miravoice was founded by Jain, and , three close friends from California who have known each other for more than a decade.

The idea for Miravoice came from firsthand experience with the pains of scaling quantitative survey research in their roles as product managers and consultants. They realized that voice agent technology would be the way these calls would be handled in the future, “if agents were appropriately crafted for the unique needs of this market use case.”

Miravoice has between 10 and 20 customers at varying stages — from paid pilot to production use cases — according to the company. Those customers include a variety of public-opinion survey organizations, market research firms, university departments and private companies across retail, entertainment and logistics.

Its revenue model is usage-based billing: Customers pay for the time its AI agents are actually on the phone with respondents.

Miravoice surpassed 100,000 calls made in 2025, per the company, and expects that number to be significantly higher this year.

“What’s exciting about the space we’re operating in is that the scale of the number of calls our platform has to handle dwarfs most other voice agent use cases,” Jain said. “Our pilot projects alone are on the order of tens of thousands of calls: more than some voice agent companies’ monthly production workloads. In production, some of our customers expect to perform millions to tens of millions of calls each year, after full deployment and implementation.”

Voice AI on the rise

, general partner at Unusual Ventures, said his firm was impressed by the founding team’s technical acumen and product vision.

In Albright’s view, Miravoice’s focus on precision data collection sets it apart from most other entrants in the voice agent market research space.

“They’ve correctly identified that voice AI can streamline operations and time-to-insight for large-scale quantitative research studies,” he wrote via email.

Another area where Miravoice distinguishes itself is its ease of use, he said.

“Many voice agent platforms are geared towards technical audiences and software developers,” Albright said. “Miravoice was built from the ground up with simplicity in mind so that truly any team can use it. This is a step-function change in making AI voice agents for surveys as ubiquitous as web forms are today.”

Indeed, voice AI startups have emerged as standouts in the vast AI space, attracting the attention of investors globally, according to Crunchbase data. Over the past two years, several voice AI companies have seen their valuations triple — a signal of accelerating market demand and perceived long-term worth.

One example of a voice AI company that has seen a massive valuation jump is , which allows creators, enterprises and others to use AI software to replicate voices in dozens of languages. The Brooklyn, New York-based startup went from achieving unicorn status with an $80 million Series B raise in January 2024 to being valued at about $3.3 billion one year later with a $180 million Series C co-led by and . Then, in February of this year, it raised a $500 million Series D round led by at an $11 billion valuation.

Related reading:

• Why Big Investors Are All Ears For Voice AI Startups
• ElevenLabs Latest AI Unicorn After $80M Raise

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The record month for venture funding took place against the backdrop of a as AI compute and tooling unsettled leading public software companies.

All told, venture investment was up close to 780% year over year from the $21.5 billion raised by startups in February 2025.

OpenAI was not the only company to raise tens of billions of dollars last month. Its closest rival, , raised $30 billion, marking the third-largest venture round on record.

, ‘s self-driving division, raised $16 billion. Together, those three rounds totaled $156 billion, representing 83% of the global venture capital raised in February.

A further four companies each raised $1 billion or more last month: Tokyo-based semiconductor manufacturer  London-based self-driving platform San Francisco-based AI for robotics  and Sunnyvale, California-based AI semiconductor company .

These massive rounds were led by strategic corporate investors, a host of private equity and alternative investors, as well as a few multistage venture investors and a government agency.

Capital concentration

Seed-stage funding was down around 11% year over year with $2.6 billion raised, per Crunchbase data. Early-stage funding held up with $13.1 billion invested, up 47% year over year.

The trend of capital concentration was not only visible in the larger late-stage financings. Seed, Series A and Series B rounds’ median and average amounts have increased each year since 2024, and continued to do so through February.

US dominated

U.S.-based startups raised $174 billion last month, Crunchbase data shows. That was the country’s largest percentage of global venture funding — 92%, and up from 59% a year earlier.

AI and hardware surge

AI-related startups raised $171 billion in February, accounting for 90% of global venture funding. Other sectors that stood out include hardware-related startups dominated by autonomous-vehicle technology, semiconductors, robotics and networking products.

Two months into the year, the public and private markets are off to a very different start. Despite optimism that the IPO momentum we saw in 2025 would continue into 2026, public market volatility and uncertainty have stalled new offerings again.  As a result, mobile marketing firm and fintech brokerage firm both withdrew their listings last month.

The private markets, by contrast, are on fire. Just a couple of months into the year, global venture funding has already topped 50% of the total invested in 2025.

Related Crunchbase query:

Related reading:

• OpenAI’s New $110B Raise At A $840B Valuation Marks The Largest Venture Deal Ever
• Anthropic Raises $30B At $380B Valuation In Second-Largest Venture Funding Deal Of All Time

Methodology

The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data reported is as of March 2, 2026.

Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Glossary of funding terms

Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less.

Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million.

Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round.

Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.)

Illustration:

and led the Series D funding for Honolulu-based Onebrief. Investors including 1, and joined. An updated valuation was not reported, but the company raised its just seven months ago at a $1.1 billion pre-money valuation, per Crunchbase.

Onebrief has now raised $311 million in total, per Crunchbase data. Along with the funding, the company acquired , a startup that makes simulation and wargaming software for the military and raised a $5 million seed round in 2023.

The company’s AI-driven collaborative and planning software is used by the to design, coordinate and brief complex military operations more efficiently, functions previously done on paper, through email and hand-written notes.

“Staffs are too slow. They’re just too slow for how fast our adversaries move now; they’re too slow for how complex the modern battlefield is. We need things to move hundreds of times faster than they do, and that takes automation,” Onebrief CEO , a former officer, told Axios.

With conflicts brewing around the world, venture investment in defense tech startups has soared in recent years, Crunchbase data shows. Funding to VC-backed startups in defense — defined by us as the industries of military, national security and law enforcement — hit $7.7 billion across close to 100 deals in 2025, per Crunchbase . That was a record high for investment in the space and more than double 2024’s tally.

Related Crunchbase queries:

Related reading:

• Sector Snapshot: Defense Tech Funding Hits Record High

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The first question investors asked me in my early months of pitching was, “Where are you from?”

The accent gave me away every time.

Following the failed 2020 revolution in Belarus, I moved my company, , to Estonia. I arrived in Estonia with no English, no network and no understanding of the Western startup world. I spent months studying the language, practicing daily to improve my pronunciation and confidence.

Even with my very basic English, I started pitching immediately. I met an angel who decided to invest after just one pitch. Only half a year after our relocation, we closed our first round of $250,000.

In today’s market, where early-stage capital is shrinking, your ability to communicate is as critical as your product. Forty-four percent of U.S. unicorn founders are immigrants, and many of them started as outsiders. You may not “look the part,” but that doesn’t have to stop you from raising money. It certainly didn’t stop me.

From that experience, here are three lessons that I believe are highly valuable for any founder aiming to stand out.

Position yourself as a problem solver, not a capital-raiser

Investors meet hundreds of founders each year. Most of them open with how much they’re raising, not why they exist. When I started framing myself as someone obsessed with solving a real communication problem, not someone asking for capital, everything changed.

People invest in clarity and conviction. Instead of limiting myself to talking about market size or monetization, I illustrated the problem: how speech anxiety, accents and vocal tension limit people’s confidence globally. When your story is rooted in a genuine mission, your accent, location or background stops being a liability and becomes part of the proof.

Use body language to communicate confidence

How you carry yourself speaks louder than your words. Investors read it instantly. For example, if you lean back when challenged, it looks defensive. That’s why when I answer questions, I lean slightly forward, smile and nod. It signals that I’m engaged and listening instead of trying to protect myself.

Confidence also shows up in stillness. When you know your material, you don’t need to over-gesture. Remember that the goal is not to perform, but to connect. Smile first, listen fully and never interrupt. These small actions create a sense of trust long before you start talking about numbers.

The studies we relied on in product development show that voices with a lower pitch are perceived as 40% more confident and authoritative. Founders don’t need to fake that, but they can train it, the same way they can train their pitch deck.

Use pitch competitions as leverage

As I worked on my communication skills, pitch competitions became my springboard. They didn’t guarantee investment, but they built momentum. And in three first years, we won six: , , StartupFair, AWS AI Challenge, the European AI Startup Program by , and . Those events brought us $700,000 and connections that led directly to our seed round.

Beyond the funding, there’s enormous value in visibility. By participating in these competitions, you get feedback, credibility and stage time. All of that accelerates learning and helps you make your story resonate across languages, markets and personalities.

When you don’t sound like an insider, raising capital is about clarity, control and presence. Investors may notice your accent in the first five seconds, but if you master those next five minutes, they’ll remember your idea, not where you came from.

Founders are obsessed with anxiously trying to get in front of investors, but anxiety kills a sale. You’ve already heard the advice from a startup mentor: practice your pitch, find your own mentors, and get feedback on your ideas.

In my experience, ideas and passion are key, but it’s your polished soft skills that actually let you show that passion to anybody.

is the co-founder and CEO of , a soft skills AI coaching startup. The company has more than 4 million downloads and 50,000 subscribers worldwide. His journey is deeply personal; he was bullied for unclear diction at school, which inspired his mission to help people communicate better. After being forced to flee his home country following the 2020 revolution, Lahoika arrived in Estonia with minimal command of English and used his own app to train his voice, securing his first round of funding within just six months. The winner of the AI Challenge and x European AI Startup Program, Vocal Image recently raised a $3.6 million seed round led by (France) and scaled to more than $14 million ARR.

Related reading:

• The Immigrant Edge: How Foreign-Born Entrepreneurs Drive America’s Unicorn Boom
• New To Silicon Valley? What I Wish I’d Known As An Immigrant Founder Back In 2017

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the global leader at seed and an active follow-on investor, was a particular standout in Q3 for deal count. As for the highest-spending investors, backers in ’s $13 billion Series F led the pack.

Overall, meanwhile, serial backers of AI megarounds topped our most-active investor ranks. These included well-known names like , , , and .

For more detail, below we break out the most-active investor ranks across multiple categories, looking at busiest lead dealmakers, highest spenders, and top venture and seed backers.

Most-active lead investors

Insight Partners was the most-active global lead investor in Q3, serving as lead or co-lead investor in 19 reported deals, per Crunchbase data. The largest rounds included a for and a for legal tech unicorn .

Accel was next, with 14 deals, followed by (formerly Sequoia India and Southeast Asia) and General Catalyst.

Spendiest investors

We can also get a sense of who put the most capital to work in Q3 by looking at lead investors in the most expensive collection of rounds.

It’s not an exact science, given that investors seldom disclose their share of a particular financing. However, it does give us an idea.

At the top of the list are co-lead investors in the latest Anthropic round: , Iconiq Capital, and .

Among other investors who led multiple rounds last quarter, the most active were Andreessen Horowitz and Insight Partners. And as shown below, there were 19 investors who led or co-led one or more rounds valued at $1 billion and up.

Busiest post-seed investors

The rankings look quite a bit different when we stop focusing on lead investors and instead look simply at who backed the most post-seed rounds.

By this measure, the far-and-away leader is Y Combinator, which rarely takes a lead role but does participate as a return investor in rounds for startups that came through its accelerator program.

General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz tied for second place, with 29 reported deals each, followed by Insight Partners and Accel, with 25 and 24 rounds, respectively.

Most-active seed investors

For this past quarter, Y Combinator also claimed its usual spot as the most-active seed-stage investor. Per Crunchbase data, the famed accelerator backed at least 218 reported seed financings, up from Q2 but down a bit year over year.

Next in the ranks was , followed by . And below, we take a lengthier look at the most-active global seed investors.

Chugging along

The big picture from Q3’s active investor tallies is that established leaders among startup investors are still very much in the game. While there’s been some shuffling in the ranks in recent quarters, the top active investor slots on our lists still contain mostly the same names.

Not coincidentally, many are also some of the biggest AI investors and already have some of the highest-profile startups in their portfolios. Given that so many of these companies continue to see big markups and red-hot investor demand, the immediate forecast is that many more big checks from these investors are likely to pile up before years end.

Related reading:

• Anthropic Nearly Triples Valuation To $183B With Massive New Funding

Illustration:

The slowdown marks a respite from the frenzied pace of venture investment in the first half of 2025 — especially for fast-growing AI companies — when startup funding increased by more than a third year over year.

Summer pullback

Since 2023, we’ve seen a noticeable summer pullback in either July or August, when global venture funding typically dips below $20 billion.

It’s typical for late-stage funding to lag in these slower months. Less typically, there was also a significant pullback at the seed stage last month, when funding at that phase nearly halved compared to July and fell a third from a year ago.

Late-stage funding declined more than 50% compared to July and fell by a fifth year over year, Crunchbase data shows.

Early-stage funding also declined month over month, but to a lesser degree, and increased slightly from a year ago. Relative to past months, Series B rounds held up by both counts and amounts.

Series B active

The two largest funding deals last month were Series B rounds to deep tech and AI startups, both based outside of the Bay Area. The largest round went to Cambridge, Massachusetts-based , a fusion energy company that raised $863 million. The second-largest was Colorado-based quantum computing ’s $593.8 million raise.

The third-largest round was a tie between Toronto, Canada-based AI lab ’s $500 million Series D and San Francisco-based coding startup ’s $500 million Series C at a $9.8 billion valuation following its earlier acquisition of .

US funding dominated

Funding to U.S.-based startups last month totaled $10.4 billion, or 61% of venture investment, per Crunchbase data.

Funding to startups headquartered in the U.S. has increased significantly year to date in 2025 to 68% of global venture capital, thanks to billion-dollar-plus funding deals for American AI companies.

AI led global startup funding again last month, totaling $4.8 billion. Healthcare and biotech followed, with startups in the sector raising $4 billion globally in August, per Crunchbase data, and more than $2 billion each went to startups in the financial services and energy sectors.

Looking forward

Despite the August funding slowdown, there are some positive signs for the startup world to look forward to, notably the reopening of the IPO markets. A more robust exit market will provide some much-needed liquidity to venture capital firms, which could in turn help reopen the funding spigot.

Methodology

The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data reported is as of Sept. 3, 2025.

Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Glossary of funding terms

Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less.

Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million.

Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round.

Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.)

Related reading:

• Enterprise GenAI Startup Cohere Confirms $500M Raise At $6.8B Valuation And Taps Ex-Meta VP As New AI Chief
• 5 Companies Kick Off IPO Roadshow 

Illustration:

Global venture investment in 2024 was above the pre-pandemic year of 2019, but below 2018 and 2020 amounts at $346 billion and $350 billion, respectively.

Table of Contents

• Breakout year for AI
• Q4 push
• Large values, billion-dollar rounds
• US gained, Silicon Valley fired up
• Late-stage Q4 boom
• Early stage flat
• Seed settled
• Liquidity hold-up
• Methodology
• Glossary of funding terms
• Related reading

Breakout year for AI

One thing was clear: 2024 was the breakout year for funding to AI companies.

Close to a third of all global venture funding went to companies in AI-related fields, making artificial intelligence the leading sector for funding. Funding to AI-related companies reached over $100 billion — up more than 80% year over year from $55.6 billion in 2023 — Crunchbase data shows. Funding to the AI sector in 2024 surpassed every year in the past decade, including the peak global funding year of 2021.

Of those AI dollars, almost a third of all AI funding went to foundation model companies.

The other two-thirds of funding went to sectors impacted by these new models. Infrastructure and data provisioning to manage and operate AI grew. Other leading sectors included autonomous driving, healthcare, robotics, professional services, security and military, Crunchbase data shows.

Q4 push

The higher total in 2024 was due to a big push in Q4 — which saw the highest funding total since the downturn in Q3 2022. The fourth quarter reached $93 billion, up 36% year over year from $69 billion in Q4 2023 , based on an analysis of Crunchbase data.

In recent years, Q4 was typically slower. The 2024 fourth quarter, however, closed with the largest rounds raised this year — $22 billion by three companies.

Large values, billion-dollar rounds

In 2024, a greater share of funding went to billion-dollar rounds, in large part driven by funding to the AI sector. In 2024, $58.3 billion — or 19% of all funding — went to billion-dollar rounds. Compare that with 2023, when $45.8 billion — or 15% of funding — went to rounds of a billion dollars or more.

The fourth quarter picked up steam with the largest valuations achieved last year. was awarded a $157 billion valuation. was valued at $62 billion in the year’s largest venture deal, a $10 billion round. And doubled its valuation in a six-month period, to $50 billion.

Not surprisingly, the largest funding rounds this past year went to companies in the AI sector — not only Databricks, OpenAI and xAI, but also and raised funding of at least $4 billion — or much more.

Other large valuations to companies in AI went to ($19 billion), Anthropic ($18.4 billion), ($14 billion), ($13.8 billion) and ($9 billion).

US gained, Silicon Valley fired up

Venture funding to U.S. companies totaled $178 billion — around 57% of total global funding. The U.S. funding market raised a greater proportion of global funding, up from 48% in 2023.

Of all U.S. funding, $90 billion was invested in the corridors of the San Francisco Bay Area, which experienced a boom from AI investing. Compare that with 2023, when Bay Area companies raised $59 billion in total funding.

Late-stage Q4 boom

Late-stage funding in the fourth quarter reached $61 billion, up more than 70% quarter over quarter and an increase year over year from the $36 billion invested in Q4 2023, Crunchbase data shows. The biggest change in Q4 from a year earlier was the increase in billion-dollar rounds. Large fundings were raised in multiple sectors such as AI, applied AI, energy, semiconductor, banking, security and aerospace, among others.

Early stage flat

Early-stage funding was flat in Q4. Large early-stage rounds went to data centers, renewable energy, AI, robotics and biotech.

Seed settled

Seed funding trailed in Q4, for now. Reaching $7 billion in Q4, seed funding was down 16% from the $8.4 billion invested a year ago. (However seed fundings are often added to the Crunchbase dataset after the close of a quarter, and should increase over time.)

Liquidity hold-up

It was a slow year for exits in 2024.

M&A activity was slightly up compared to 2023 — but slower than expected and somewhat concentrated in biotechnology and cybersecurity companies.

Of the magnificent seven,, and hired AI teams from , and , respectively, as the regulatory environment impeded strategic dealmaking. was the most active acquirer in 2024 among this cohort.

The IPO market — also slow in 2024 — ended on a positive note with the unexpected bump from the IPO, which as of the new year is above its IPO price by more than 40%.

An opening up of the IPO markets in 2025 will drive LP allocation to venture, said , a partner at Sapphire Partners, in an interview. “History just shows very clearly that when there’s positive liquidity, more money goes into venture funds,” she said.

Methodology

The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data reported is as of Jan. 3, 2025.

Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Glossary of funding terms

Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less.

Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million.

Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round.

Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.)

Related reading

• OpenAI Raises $6.6B At $157B Valuation
• Databricks Raises $10B In 2024’s Largest Venture Funding Deal
• The 10 Biggest Rounds Of November: xAI And Anthropic Raise Billions Again
• AI Cloud Infrastructure Startup CoreWeave Raises Huge New Round At Reported $19B Valuation
• Anduril Industries Valued At $14B After $1.5B Series F
• Scale AI Raises $1B In Accel-Led Round; Hits $13.8B Valuation
• SpaceX Shooting For $750M Round At $137B Valuation — Report
• Forecast: 2024 Was Slow For Tech IPOs, But 2025 Could Be Different
• What We Learned About AI From 7 Active Startup Investors This Year

Illustration:

The firm invests very early in companies with technology that can be challenging to understand. Its investment focus is in deep tech in semiconductor materials and robotics companies, in healthtech companies and also in the data economy, which includes AI. 

Founded by and in 2010, the firm has built an impressive portfolio of more than 200 companies in its 13 years of operation. 

TSVC’s four general partners have operating experience as well as engineering backgrounds. Alongside the general partners, the firm evaluates companies with the technical knowledge of its 14 venture partners, many of them founders and tech executives with Ph.D.s. 

It led the seed round in in 2011. It also invested early in now public companies , , and in , a growing private company that rethinks student transportation. 

We spoke with TSVC partner on the firm’s deep tech successes, its approach to investing at seed, and the AI investment boom. Greene joined TSVC in 2020 and leads the firm’s health practice. 

For Greene, it’s not enough for a startup’s technology to be innovative today. He wants to know: How will that tech hold up years from now? Can it fight off competitors and copycats?

 The majority of the firm’s portfolio companies have an AI component — but that’s not enough.

“I spend more time and energy looking for defensibility than what we used to,” Greene said. “AI needs to be coupled with something else to make it hard enough, because it’s going to be transformative for so many industries.”  

Betting on AI

TSVC invests in a startup’s team, product or technology, and then market size.

“I think AI is, for most businesses, table stakes,” said Greene. “AI and some other technologies together have made barriers to entry lower in many situations. That can be a good thing if you’re an early-stage startup — you can attack incumbents who are much larger than you, and you can get to market very quickly. But it can also make it harder to build a sustainable business because you can be vulnerable just as easily to someone else who comes after you.”

In the health care sector, for example, Greene said investors understand that AI will be able to read X-rays and pathology slides better than a doctor. However, once this technology is FDA-approved, it might not be defensible as a technology unless the startup has a unique and large dataset that creates some differentiation. 

TSVC applies the same principles to its other sectors, such as the AI and robotic space, where the firm has been active lately. There is a ton of innovation happening in computer vision, Greene said. 

The firm’s portfolio companies include:

• Computer vision companies and robotics company , which prunes grapevines without destroying crops.
• , a precision manufacturing company that uses 3-D vision useful for building smartphones that require many manual assembly steps — a technology that was not possible only a few years ago.
• which uses AI to discover alternate materials for the lithium battery market. Automat’s AI engine predicts suitable materials, which are then tested in a lab for the ability to store more energy or charge faster or maintain cooler temperatures. This learning then gets fed back into new predictive models.
• , which aims to keep Medicaid patients healthy and out of the hospital — something that would have an enormous impact, according to Greene.
• , which provides specialty health care coordination, saving on costs — and highlighting TSVC’s interest in startups that tackle inefficiencies in the health care space.

Early Zoom

When TSVC first invested in Zoom, it was not at all clear that the company could succeed in a competitive market for web-conferencing. 

TSVC’s Zhang met Zoom founder through an organization for Chinese tech professionals in the Bay Area. At the time, Zoom was focused on the consumer market, via a ����ܲ�����.��

TSVC wasn’t sure if the consumer approach would work, but Yuan had experience in the sector. He had left online conferencing company — then owned by — frustrated by what he saw as lack of innovation. Yuan hired a team of engineers who invented a new codec that improved the audio and video quality in conference calls with better compression technology. 

The underlying technology was important to its success alongside the intuitive interface that Zoom is known for. 

Zhang led TSVC’s investment in Zoom, a seed round of $3 million in 2011 that valued the company at $15 million. Afterward, he noticed that on a flight using Wi-Fi that while his call didn’t hold up, the Zoom call did. 

The pre-A stage

The seed market has changed, Greene said. “I hadn’t heard the term pre-A hardly at all until lately, and now I seem to hear it all the time.” 

Companies that manage to raise Series A funding are spending a longer time to get there, according to a recent analysis of Crunchbase data. 

This has given rise to seed extension rounds, a signal the valuation is flat from a prior funding typically two years ago. And when a company is raising pre-A it reads as there is a little step up in valuation. But overall they are both saying they are not yet ready for a Series A funding. 

Still, TSVC has not seen a decline in the number of companies pitching for funding. “We are seeing much more reasonableness on valuations. There was a point in time where it kind of went crazy,” he said.  

Initial check size for the firms these days is $500,000 to $1 million with reserves for follow-on funding, according to Greene.

TSVC co-invests in seed rounds that are typically $3 million to $6 million but can be around $2 million as well.  The firm’s valuations for seed deals are typically around $10 million, $15 million or, on the higher end, $20 million.

Greene predicts that amid turmoil in the tech world, there are opportunities for very early-stage investors like TSVC. “Some of the layoffs in Big Tech have been pulling back their moonshot projects, and essentially ceding territory back to venture,” he said. 

Related Crunchbase Pro query:

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Average and median deal sizes have dipped since the latter half of 2022, Crunchbase data shows. That follows a systematic rise over the previous decade for U.S.-based startups.

Within that decade-long rise, there was a noticeable upward inflection in recent years. In 2021, round size from seed to Series B leapt up between 25% and 59% year over year — even more than in prior years. For Series C, the initial surge took place a year earlier in 2020, based on an analysis of Crunchbase data.

But starting in the second half of last year, average and median round sizes have flattened or shifted down. The downward shift is noticeable but gradual, with more mature companies from Series C onward hit the hardest for now. For the past quarter, seed through Series B fundings hovered above 2020 average and median size, while Series C fundings remained below.

We also see another interesting trend as the decade progresses: The gap between median and average funding by type has widened in recent years. This shows that sizable rounds at each stage have become more common, pushing averages up more dramatically. (We did place an upper limit for each funding type to limit the impact of outlier rounds on average fundings.)

Let’s dive in and look at each stage as they illustrate some matching and some divergent dynamics.

Seed

The size of the typical seed funding round peaked in 2022, Crunchbase data shows, but has since dipped.

If you go back about 10 years to 2014, the median and average seed funding for a U.S.-based startup was below $1 million.

Since 2014, the typical seed deal has increased in size and peaked in 2022 at a median of $2.5 million and an average of $3.7 million.1

In contrast to the overall venture funding pullback in 2022, seed funding was higher in the first half of 2022 compared to 2021 and showed a decline year over year starting in the fourth quarter.

Series A

The median and average Series A deal size also peaked in 2022 before dropping more recently, Crunchbase data shows.

The growth of the seed ecosystem impacted Series A fundings as it expanded the number of years a startup could build in advance of a Series A funding.

Median and average Series A fundings in 2014 were $5 million and $7.7 million, respectively, for U.S.-based startups.

The typical Series A deal size peaked in 2022 at $14 million (median) and $19.1 million (average). It has since come down to $12 million and $18.7 million, respectively — not a big drop, one could say. (But, keep in mind, we expect those amounts for the most recent quarter to trend down further as fundings continue to be added to the database after the end of the quarter. We find that deals added after the close of a quarter tend to be smaller.)

Series B

Series B fundings peaked sooner than seed and Series A — all the way back in 2021, Crunchbase data shows. This indicates a sharper pullback in funding in 2022 from Series B onward.

In 2014, Series B deals tracked at a median of $11.7 million and an average of $16.3 million.

That ramped up substantially over the following decade to peak in 2021 at a median of $32 million and an average of $46 million.

That’s dipped again somewhat to $28 million and $40 million, respectively, in 2023.

Series C

Similar to Series B funding, Series C peaked in 2021. But the jump in funding happened in 2020, a year earlier than prior funding stages.

Series C fundings show the greatest decline for all stages analyzed here. In 2014, the median Series C funding was $18 million and the average $26.4 million. That peaked in 2021 at $60 million and $82 million, respectively.

In Q1 2023, a median Series C round for a U.S.-based startup was $42 million and the average $59 million. The gap has also narrowed slightly, indicating fewer larger rounds at Series C.

Never going back again

While it is clear we are not going back to funding levels from a decade ago, the question is whether round sizes will shrink back to pre-pandemic levels.

For now, the only stage we analyze here that’s dropped below 2020 levels is Series C funding. But even Series C is still above the 2019 median and average round size.

What we can say is that the reset is only two to three quarters in and likely has not yet hit bottom. Each distinct funding stage is reacting to the cuts in the stage after it. If late-stage funding continues to contract due to the closure of the IPO markets, then startups at earlier stages face an uncertain future.

Related reading

• Getting To Series A Has Gotten Harder
• Series B Funding Has Also Fallen Sharply
• Series C Isn’t What It Used To Be
• Series D Hits Lowest Point In Years. What Does That Mean?

Methodology

For this analysis we only include U.S.-headquartered companies to remove the impact of distinct trends in different geographies.

For seed funding we exclude angel and pre-seed rounds. For each funding type we exclude outlier rounds. At seed we excluded fundings of $100 million and more. At Series A we exclude fundings at or above $200 million. For Series B we exclude fundings at or above $300 million and for Series C fundings at or above $500 million.

Illustration: Dom Guzman