On Tuesday, San Jose, California-based , the developer of general purpose humanoid robots, that it raised $1 billion in Series C financing. The round, led by , set a $39 billion post-money valuation for the company.

Figure, founded in 2022 by founder , plans to use the Series C money to scale its artificial intelligence platform and manufacturing capabilities. Other investors in the round include , , , , , , , 1, , and .

The startup is currently working on bots that can assist in household tasks as well as in the commercial workforce.

It’s both an extraordinarily ambitious and costly mission. That helps explain why the round qualifies as the largest robotics-related financing of 2025, per Crunchbase .

Figure’s financing also bumped up total funding to the sector to more than $8.5 billion this year. That puts the space on track for its largest fundraising haul since 2021.

Other big fundraisers

While Figure is the only robotics startup to raise a billion-dollar round this year, several others have raised rounds in the hundreds of millions. U.S. funding to the space has been particularly strong, as illustrated below in a sample list of the largest funding recipients of the year.

This includes , the developer of implantable brain-computer interfaces, which raised $650 million in a financing deal reported in May. While Neuralink isn’t a pure-play robotics company, it has applications in the space, including surgical robots for implanting its devices and technology to allow recipients of its implants to control robotic prosthetic limbs.

, a spinoff from known for its flagship Apollo robot, was also in demand, securing $403 million in Series A and extension funding, led by and .

, a developer of AI systems for operating autonomous robots, was another major fundraiser, picking up $405 million across two consecutive rounds in August. The Irvine, California, startup counts among its lead investors.

, which is focused on every person’s dream of robots that can do household chores, also picked up a big round. The San Francisco startup, founded last year, closed on $150 million in March, bringing total funding to date to $300 million.

Funding outpaces exits

Even as funding accelerates, we aren’t seeing much in the way of large-scale robotics acquisitions and IPOs this year. That’s not surprising, given that so many of investors’ most sought-after startups are still early stage.

Moreover, a traditional IPO or M&A deal isn’t the only way to measure success for these startups, particularly in an age when so many unicorns are staying private longer. Instead, what might get both investors and the rest of us excited would be the introduction of an affordable bot capable of doing more of our least favorite tasks.

Related Crunchbase queries:

Related reading:

• Robotics Startup Funding Rises

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Among them, the most heavily funded and probably best known is Paris-based generative AI startup , which was in the spotlight today with the of a roughly $2 billion Series C round.

Semiconductor equipment manufacturer led the financing, joined by a long list of existing investors 1. The round sets a $13.7 billion valuation for the 2-year-old company, which is roughly double the level set in its June 2024 Series B.

The new valuation may sound middle-of-the-road by California benchmarks, with San Francisco-based now valued at $183 billion and reportedly eyeing the $500 billion . By European standards, however, Mistral’s latest fundraise and valuation are a historically big deal.

Record-setting AI round for Europe

Per Crunchbase data, Mistral’s Series C is the largest venture round ever raised by a European AI company.

No one else comes close. For perspective, here are the four next-largest AI startup equity financings, ordered by size:

• , $1.08B, Series C: London-based autonomous driving software developer Wayve raised $1.08 billion in a May 2024 Series C led by .
• , $1B, Series D: Celonis, a provider of “process mining” tools for businesses to find and fix inefficiencies, which has headquarters in Munich and New York, secured $1 billion in a 2021 Series D.
• , $700M, Series D: Helsing, a developer of AI-enabled autonomous systems for the defense industry, including drones, raised $700 million in a June Series D.
• , $600 million, initial funding: London-based Isomorphic Labs, a spinoff focused on AI-enabled drug detection, raised $600 million in an initial funding round led by .

For more deals, we put together a list of all European AI-related financings of $200 million or more from the past five years .

Mistral also stands out for its GenAI focus

Of the largest European AI rounds, it’s also noteworthy that Mistral is the only GenAI play near the top of the rankings. The company is marketing its offerings to enterprises, pitching its proficiency in content creation, data analysis and AI-assisted coding.

One thing the company is not marketing itself as is a bargain to investors. Looking purely at its valuation, however, it is certainly a lot cheaper than leading U.S. GenAI names.

Related Crunchbase 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

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led the new capital infusion, a Series C, with participation from , , and .1

The round caught my eye for two reasons. First, it’s money invested in a French company. I can’t recall the last time we covered a French startup’s funding event. And, second, the firm shared an interesting bit of growth data. It went as follows, with a slight lead-in from myself:

[The company has a]chieved compound 3-digit revenue growth for 6 consecutive years.

That’s quite impressive. If a firm started with $1 million in revenue, for example, after six years of merely doubling it would have grown to $64 million in revenue by the end of the period. Given that the firm simply claims “3-digit” growth, the compounding effect could be even sharper, though we lack an initial revenue figure to lean upon for context.

Doubling is an activity that really adds up. Doubling for more than a half-decade is the sort of growth that investors covet. Recall that investors these days are always hunting for the fabled “triple-triple-double-double,” a startup that triples its revenue in each of two consecutive years, and then doubles twice over the next two.

A company starting with $1 million in revenue would have $36 million after completing its “TTDD.” That sort of growth is venture capital catnip.

Back to Akeneo, the firm has 180 employees in a half-dozen countries per its own reporting, and intends to “hire 100 additional staff in the next year.” That will quickly spike its burn rate, so the new capital is likely very welcome.

As a final note, Akeneo is an . It feels like these sorts of startups are not as common as we might have expected, a few years back. But after the huge , and Microsoft’s embrace of open source (not to mention its ), perhaps we’re seeing more momentum for companies that leverage open code.

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, a Tel Aviv-based company that develops and supports a database of the same name, announced that it has closed a $10 million Series C funding round led by . Prior investors like , , , and participated in the round. , managing partner of TLV Partners, will be joining the company’s board.

The company was founded by and . Both co-founders worked together at a company called which was later . At Qumranet and later at Red Hat, Kivity worked as the lead maintainer for the (KVM). Laor was a manager of the KVM project and briefly served as Red Hat’s director of platform virtualization before both he and Kivity left in late 2012 to start OSv. OSv developed the cloud computing operating system OSv, and the server-side application framework . The company rebranded to ScyllaDB in 2015.

To date, including this most recent round of funding, the company has raised .

The Technology

When working with large datasets, especially in cases where speed is critically important, it’s important to use a database that delivers high throughput with low latency. In other words: use a system that can move a lot of stuff very quickly.

ScyllaDB is an open-source NoSQL database that can serve as a drop-in replacement for . Cassandra bills itself as a distributed, high-performance, and scalable NoSQL database. A NoSQL database allows software engineers to input, store, and read data that doesn’t fit into traditional tabular formats used in databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL.

According to the company, it can deliver performance of one million input-output operations per second (IOPS) per node, can scale out to hundreds of nodes, and has a 99 percent tail latency of less than one millisecond.

“Beyond its distinct performance advantages, Scylla is unique in its ability to fully exploit available hardware resources, leading to a dramatic reduction in [total cost of ownership],” Shahar Tzafrir said in a statement.

So what makes ScyllaDB so fast, at least when compared to Cassandra? ScyllaDB does away with Java and the performance limitations of the JVM. Instead, ScyllaDB uses , an open-source C++ framework developed by ScyllaDB’s team for building high-performance server-side applications. Using Seastar, ScyllaDB shards processing requests across multiple engines, each running its own memory and network interface controller on individual CPU cores.

These close-to-the-hardware improvements deliver higher scalability and stability, and lower latency compared to Cassandra and other NoSQL database solutions.

The Market

According to , an information resource covering relational and NoSQL databases, Cassandra is the eighth most popular database system worldwide as of February 2018.

ScyllaDB boasts full compatibility with Cassandra, but it’s been used by companies with other needs. Extant implementations of ScyllaDB involve it being used for key-value storage, time series databases, large blob storage, and as a backend to graph databases, among other applications.

Shahar Tzafrir said in a statement that customers using Cassandra, Hbase, MongoDB, Redis, and even MySQL are switching to ScyllaDB. ScyllaDB’s current users include AppNexus, AdGear, CERN, Discord, IBM, Nauto, Ola Cabs, Samsung, and Ytel.

In addition to its open source offering, ScyllaDB offers an enterprise version as well. CEO Dor Laor said in a statement that “later this year we will launch our database-as-a-service offering as the next logical step for our high-performance NoSQL database.”

Although a lot of attention has been paid to huge funding rounds at the later stage – in particular, the recent spate of mega-rounds led by SoftBank’s $100 billion Vision Fund – outsized rounds abound at all stages. Crunchbase News has also explored some of the smallest funding rounds startups raise. But up to this point, we haven’t taken a look at big rounds at early stages. And this is a somewhat glaring omission because seed and early-stage funding rounds make up the surpassing majority of deal volume around the world.

If you’ll forgive the pun, it’s kind of a big deal.

Today, we’re going to take a look at this growing phenomenon, what it means, and what might be happening “under the hood” in supergiant seed rounds.

The Rise And Rise Of Supergiant Rounds

In this section, we’re going to zip through a fairly large amount of funding data rather quickly. The exact numbers are less important than the overall trends they indicate. To wit, that both middle-of-the-road rounds and their supergiant counterparts alike have grown significantly in size over the past decade.

But before showing the charts and analyzing the data behind them, allow us a second to explain what, exactly, we’re talking about when we talk about supergiant rounds.

For our purposes here, we’ve borrowed the term “supergiant” from astronomy. , as the name may suggest, are some of the most massive and luminous celestial bodies in the universe. Similarly, the supergiant funding rounds we’re examining here are among the largest raised by startups, and they’re the rounds that grab the most headlines.

Hunting For Giants

We define the set of “supergiant” rounds as the top ten percent of deals struck for each round type, by year. So, for example, if there were 5,000 Seed rounds closed in a given year, the “supergiants” would be the top 500 seed rounds – ranked by the amount of money raised – for that year. Likewise, if there were 1,500 Series A rounds closed in that same year, we’d call the 150 largest Series A rounds supergiants as well.

The following analysis is based on a dataset of . We’ll compare the average size of supergiant rounds against a of round sizes, which doesn’t include the top or bottom ten percent of rounds.

Why go with a trimmed average? We want to exclude the supergiant rounds because they’d artificially skew the general average upward, but by the same token we want to filter out the smallest rounds (, for example) that would artificially skew figures lower. To reiterate, by comparing an average of the median eighty percent rounds to the average of the top ten percent of rounds, we’ll be able to see how supergiant round sizes related to those “in the middle of the road” over the past decade.

Our primary focus here will be deals from the earliest stages – Seed and Angel, Series A, and Series B – but we’ll get into some findings from later stages too. Let’s start with the earliest rounds and move later from there. And once we’ve shown the data, we’ll share some observations gleaned from it.

Seed And Angel Rounds

For , we found both that the size of both middle-of-the-road and supergiant rounds have grown significantly over the past decade, as the chart below shows.

The size of middle-of-the-road Seed and Angel rounds grew by roughly 145 percent over the course of the last ten years, and supergiant rounds are just under 63 percent larger than the supergiant average from a decade ago.

And – in what will become a common refrain – the companies that raised these large rounds are primarily located in just a few cities.

A majority of supergiant Seed and Angel rounds were raised by startups based in the SF Bay Area and New York City. Let’s see if the same pattern occurs at Series A.

Series A Rounds

Like with seed and angel rounds, the chart below aggregates data from and shows how much Series A rounds have grown over the past decade.

The size of supergiant Series A rounds grew by a similar amount to middle-of-the-road Seed and Angel deals, increasing by 140 percent over the course of the last ten years. More pedestrian Series A rounds are just under 130 percent larger, up from a trimmed average of $4.93 million in 2008 to $11.29 million in 2018, year to date.

The distribution of startups raising supergiant Series A rounds is similar to even earlier-stage counterparts.

Again, a majority of supergiant Series A rounds are raised by startups headquartered in just a few cities. In addition to San Francisco and New York City, life-sciences heavy Boston takes second place in the ranking of a decade’s worth of huge Series A rounds.

Last but not least, it’s on to Series B.

Series B Rounds

Our Series B dataset contained , but unlike earlier rounds the general “up and to the right” trendline isn’t so clear. As the chart below shows, it appears as though the size of Series B rounds has somewhat leveled off, at least on an annual timescale.

Supergiant Series B rounds have grown by 65 percent over the last decade. The more middle-of-the-road Series B round has also grown, but by a more significant 83 percent since 2008.

The geographic distribution of startups that raised the most supergiant Series B rounds is strikingly similar to the population of Series A fundraisers.

Again, San Francisco and the broader Bay Area ranks at the top of the charts, followed by Boston, NYC, Los Angeles, and San Diego – the same rank order as the prior round type.

And now that we’ve got the raw data out there, let’s see what we can take away from all of this.

The Pie Shrinks As The Middle Grows

Higher Growth Rates Amongst Middle-Of-The-Road Rounds

Although the growing size of supergiant rounds may be impressive due to sheer size alone, it’s actually middle-of-the-road rounds that have grown the most consistently over the past decade.

In two of the three round types we reviewed above, the compound annual growth rate (or CAGR, for those of you who like acronyms) of supergiants underperformed more quotidian rounds, as the table below shows.

This all suggests that despite supergiant rounds getting all the attention, performance in more middle-of-the-road rounds has been even better, at least from a dollars-raised standpoint.

Growing Geographic Concentration Of Supergiant Rounds

By definition, supergiant rounds suck up a lot of capital, and they seem to be primarily located in just a few deep pools. As the funding cycle progresses, it appears as though more of the supergiant rounds are raised in just a handful of cities.

As the funding cycle progresses, the percentage of rounds raised by startups located in the top three cities seems to increase after an initial drop following Seed. 55 percent of supergiant A rounds were raised by startups from the Bay Area, NYC, and Los Angeles. Although not pictured above, 67 percent of supergiant Series C deals were struck by companies from the Bay Area, Boston, and New York City.

But what’s even more striking is the declining percentage share of supergiant rounds raised by startups outside the top-five rankings for a particular stage.

The chart above shows that the ability to close very large rounds is generally concentrated in fewer and fewer places as the funding cycle progresses.

We stopped our analysis at Series D due to limited sample size.

The Growing Dominance Of Supergiant Rounds

Some have shown that it’s not just the average round size that’s growing across most stages over time, but the number of large outlier rounds as well. For example, , a venture investor at , that the proportion of Series A deals larger than $50 million grew by an astonishing 721 percent from 2008 to 2017. The share of Series B rounds in the $50 million-plus range grew three hundred percent over the same period. He concluded that “venture is being increasingly driven by large rounds.”

Inspired by Levine’s research, , an economist, and strategy advisor, that between 2007 and 2017, deal volume has declined while dollar volume rose across almost all stages of funding he analyzed. This is in line with analysis from Crunchbase News from late 2017. And in , he charted the growing number of large rounds over that time period.

Indeed, it was Levine and Hathaway’s analysis that prompted us to look at the numbers as well, albeit from a slightly different angle, one more focused on geography and population-scale shifts in round size at the highest end of the spectrum. Our findings confirm a piece of common sense: expensive cities (see: NYC and the Bay Area) or and those home to capital-intensive industries like biotechnology and advanced manufacturing (see: Boston and San Diego) are the primary drivers and beneficiaries of the trend toward supergiant rounds

A decade’s worth of history suggests that this is one status quo that won’t be disrupted soon, no matter how much “disruptive” startups may raise in the future.