AI Startup Funding Tracker
May 2026's top 15 funding rounds totaling $75B+ across frontier AI, autonomous defense, agentic software, enterprise AI, and AI inference infrastructure
Anthropic
The $65B Series H at a $965B post-money valuation makes Anthropic the world's most valuable private AI company — leapfrogging OpenAI — as run-rate revenue surpasses $47B and Claude becomes indispensable to global enterprises
Anthropic raised $65 billion in Series H funding on May 28, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, with co-leadership from Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN. The round values Anthropic at $965 billion post-money — making it the most valuable private AI company in the world, surpassing OpenAI's $852B mark. The raise includes $15 billion of previously committed hyperscaler investments, including $5B from Amazon. Anthropic's run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier in May, up from ~$30B in April and ~$9B at end-2025. The funding will advance safety and interpretability research, expand compute capacity for Claude, and scale Claude Code, Cowork, and enterprise partnerships.
Anduril Industries
Defense tech darling doubles valuation to $61B in a year — $5B Series H to scale Arsenal-1 manufacturing, autonomous drones, and AI-powered military command systems
Anduril Industries raised $5 billion in Series H funding led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, doubling its valuation from $30.5 billion to $61 billion in under a year. The raise brings total funding to $11.4 billion. CEO Brian Schimpf said the capital will fund aggressive investment in manufacturing capacity, R&D, and infrastructure — spanning autonomous aircraft, drones, missile systems, integrated air defense, and the Lattice AI command-and-control platform. The company reported revenue of $2.2 billion in 2025 (up 110% YoY) and projects $4.3 billion for 2026 driven by Arsenal-1 scaling in Ohio. The U.S. Army awarded Anduril a 10-year enterprise contract worth up to $20 billion in March 2026.
Cognition AI (Devin)
Devin writes 89% of Cognition's own production code — $1B raise at $26B valuation validates autonomous software engineering as operational reality, not a future bet
Cognition AI raised $1 billion+ in Series D funding co-led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC, with participation from Founders Fund, Ribbit Capital, and Atreides Management. The round more than doubled the company's valuation in under eight months. Revenue run rate grew from $37M in May 2025 to $492M by May 2026 — a 13x increase in 12 months. Enterprise customers include Goldman Sachs, Mercedes-Benz, NASA, and Santander. The headline statistic: 89% of all code committed at Cognition is now shipped by Devin, its autonomous AI software engineer. Total raised exceeds $2.5 billion. The company acquired Windsurf's assets in mid-2025 following Google's talent acquisition.
Sierra
Bret Taylor's enterprise AI agent platform hits $15.8B valuation — $150M ARR reached in 8 quarters, the fastest in enterprise SaaS history, now targeting the "global standard" for AI-powered customer experience
Sierra raised $950 million in Series E funding led by Tiger Global and Google's GV, with participation from Benchmark, Sequoia, Greenoaks, and others. Co-founded by Bret Taylor (former Salesforce co-CEO, current OpenAI chairman) and Clay Bavor, Sierra builds AI agents for enterprise customer experience. The company serves nearly half the Fortune 50, including Prudential, Cigna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Rocket Mortgage. Sierra crossed $150M ARR within eight quarters of launch in February 2024 — a pace it claims no traditional software firm has ever matched. Taylor stated the raise is to maintain a lead in a rapidly crowding market: "We are multiples larger than the next biggest."
Cohere + Aleph Alpha
The enterprise AI consolidation play of 2026 — Cohere and Aleph Alpha merge backed by $600M from Schwarz Group, creating a privacy-first sovereign AI giant for European and enterprise markets
Cohere and Aleph Alpha announced an intent to merge in late April, backed by a $600 million structured financing commitment from Schwarz Group, Germany's largest retailer and operator of Lidl and Kaufland. The combined entity is designed to become the dominant privacy-first, enterprise-focused AI platform — targeting regulated industries, governments, and corporations that require on-premise or sovereign AI deployments. Cohere had raised $1.6B total prior to the deal, with existing investors including Nvidia, AMD, Inovia Capital, and Salesforce Ventures. The merger positions the combined company as a credible alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic in the European enterprise and sovereign AI market.
DeepInfra
Purpose-built inference cloud processing 5 trillion tokens per week — Nvidia-backed Series B targets global GPU capacity expansion as inference becomes the new compute battleground
DeepInfra raised $107 million in Series B funding to scale its purpose-built AI inference cloud. The Palo Alto company, founded by the team behind the imo messenger, owns and operates GPU infrastructure across eight U.S. data centers and supports 190+ open-source models through OpenAI-compatible APIs. Token volume has grown 25x since its Series A, with the platform now processing nearly five trillion tokens per week. Revenue has tripled since the start of 2026. The company plans to expand globally beyond its current U.S. footprint and has early access to Nvidia's Blackwell and Vera Rubin GPUs with integration of Nvidia Dynamo distributed-inference software.
Parallel
$230M raised and a $2B valuation for the web-search infrastructure layer powering AI agents — a pure infrastructure bet on the explosion of autonomous agents that need live retrieval
Parallel raised $230 million in total funding, reaching a $2 billion valuation, to build web-search infrastructure specifically designed for AI agents. As agentic systems proliferate across enterprise workflows, live retrieval from the web becomes a critical dependency — and Parallel builds the search and source-control layer that allows agents to access, navigate, and act on real-time web content reliably. The $2 billion valuation reflects investor conviction that agent-layer infrastructure is as fundable as the agents themselves. The round confirms a broader May 2026 capital theme: infrastructure beneath the model, not models themselves, captures the next layer of durable value.
Scout AI
Autonomous aviation command-layer AI for defense — $100M raise taps into a defense-tech funding wave that has already deployed $13.6B in 2026 year-to-date through mid-May
Scout AI raised $100 million to scale its autonomous aviation command-and-control AI systems for defense applications. The raise is part of the defense-tech funding surge that has seen nearly $13.6 billion deployed year-to-date through mid-May 2026, according to Crunchbase data. Scout AI's software sits at the decision layer for autonomous aerial platforms — the kind of system that becomes increasingly critical as conflicts accelerate demand for AI-coordinated drone fleets and autonomous strike systems. The company joins Anduril and Shield AI in defining the defense AI infrastructure stack now receiving institutional capital at scale.
Steno
Unique among legal AI — Steno is both a court reporting firm AND an AI platform, giving its Transcript Genius product privileged access to real litigation workflow data competitors can't replicate
Steno raised a new growth round in May 2026 to scale its AI-powered legal platform. Unlike pure-software legal AI rivals like Harvey or Legora, Steno operates as both a court reporting services firm and a technology company — giving it access to real litigation workflow data that software-only competitors cannot acquire. Its flagship product, Transcript Genius, uses generative AI to analyze case transcripts, index testimony for search-like retrieval, and help attorneys build litigation strategy faster. Thousands of law firms use Steno monthly. The round funds geographic expansion and deeper penetration into the AmLaw 200, cementing legal AI as one of 2026's deepest-funded professional-services categories.
Halter
New Zealand's largest VC raise ever at $220M — Halter's solar-powered smart collars and AI-driven livestock management platform nearly doubles valuation in nine months, proving physical AI's reach into agriculture
Halter raised $220 million in Series E funding at a $2 billion valuation — the largest VC raise in New Zealand's history — nearly doubling its $1 billion valuation from just nine months prior. Halter builds solar-powered smart collars for livestock combined with an AI platform that manages grazing, movement, health monitoring, and farm operations autonomously. The company's technology removes the need for traditional fencing across vast farm areas while optimizing pasture utilization through AI-driven herd management. The raise was led by Founders Fund, with participation from Blackbird, DCVC, BOND, and Bessemer Venture Partners, confirming that physical AI investment is not limited to urban robotics or defense.
Legora
Swedish legal AI unicorn adds Nvidia's NVentures to its $5.55B cap table — silicon-layer validation signals legal AI is graduating from niche to compute-intensive production category
Legora (formerly Leya) raised a $50 million extension from Nvidia's NVentures venture arm in late April, adding strategic silicon-layer validation to its cap table following its $550 million Series D in March at $5.55 billion. Nvidia's direct investment signals that legal AI is graduating from a niche experiment to a compute-intensive production category. Legora serves 800+ law firms and in-house legal teams across 50+ markets and grew from 40 to 400 employees over the past year. It is aggressively expanding across the U.S. and ranks alongside Harvey and Steno as one of the defining legal AI companies of 2026.
SendCutSend
AI-powered on-demand sheet metal and fabrication platform raises $110M Series D — where physical AI meets manufacturing at scale, with instant quoting and automated production workflows
SendCutSend raised $110 million in Series D funding to scale its AI-powered on-demand sheet metal and fabrication platform. The company uses AI to enable instant quoting, automated design-for-manufacture feedback, and rapid production turnaround for custom metal parts — serving hardware startups, engineers, and manufacturers who need fast iteration cycles. The raise is part of the broader physical AI and AI-in-manufacturing investment theme of 2026, where capital is flowing into companies that bridge the gap between digital AI workflows and physical production systems. SendCutSend competes in the same capital narrative as Project Prometheus and Eclipse VC's manufacturing thesis.
Turion Space
Space-based AI intelligence company raises growth capital to build persistent on-orbit sensing — compressing the military OODA loop through on-orbit AI inference that ground systems cannot match
Turion Space raised a new growth round in May 2026 to scale its space-based AI intelligence platform, pairing capital with a defense-adjacent market tailwind. The company builds persistent space-based sensing combined with onboard AI inference that compresses the OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) loop in ways bandwidth-constrained ground processing cannot. Turion is also positioned to compete for work tied to a major Space Force supplier program. The raise, led by Washington Harbour Partners with multiple defense-aligned co-investors, places Turion alongside Shield AI and Anduril as a defining player in the defense AI wave — confirming that space intelligence is one of 2026's most fundable defense-tech subcategories.
Eridu
Stealth AI networking startup emerges with $200M+ in Series A — targeting the data center interconnect layer that determines how fast AI workloads can scale across distributed GPU clusters
Eridu emerged from stealth with over $200 million in Series A funding led by Socratic Partners, John Doerr, Hudson River Trading, Capricorn Investment Group, and Matter Venture Partners. The company builds AI networking infrastructure targeting the interconnect layer inside and between data centers — the layer that determines throughput, latency, and scale ceiling for distributed AI training and inference. As GPU clusters expand to tens of thousands of accelerators, the networking fabric becomes a primary scaling constraint. Eridu's raise is part of 2026's sustained capital theme: infrastructure beneath the model rather than the model itself captures durable enterprise value.
Rebar AI
AI operating system for commercial HVAC, electrical, and plumbing suppliers — Series A proves that vertical AI wins aren't only in legal or healthcare; construction procurement is equally ripe for disruption
Rebar AI raised $14 million in Series A funding led by Peak XV Partners, with participation from Endeavor Health Ventures and Y Combinator, to scale its AI operating system for commercial HVAC, electrical, and plumbing suppliers. The company's proprietary computer vision models analyze construction blueprints to automatically identify, categorize, and count equipment — reducing quote generation time by 60–70% and boosting customer win rates by 2–3x. Founded in October 2024 by ex-HVAC estimator Evan Brown, Rebar doubled its ARR in the first six weeks of 2026 alone. The raise is a signal that May 2026 AI capital is not confined to mega-rounds: vertical AI with deep workflow integration and hard operational data moats is fundable at every stage.