Joanna Glasner

So far this year, companies in the gaming space have raised around $2 billion in seed- through growth-stage funding. That's already ahead of the 2025 full-year total, driven in large part by big rounds for companies at the intersection of AI and gaming. 

After a week of multiple billion-dollar-plus rounds, startup investors have reduced the number of zeroes on their funding checks. This past week, the largest U.S. startup funding rounds were in the hundreds of millions, topped by a $550 million financing for AI infrastructure company Temporal Technologies and a $308 million investment in space vehicle developer Impulse Space.

While the AI boom has disrupted funding patterns across the startup sphere, biotech has remained a rare steady sector for investment. For the past few years, global funding to biotech startups has hovered between $36 billion and $40 billion. Per Crunchbase data, 2026 is on track to stay close to that range.

Most of this week’s largest funding recipients were AI-focused startups, with Instinct, a developer of AI assistants, pulling in the biggest round.

Amid fierce competition for an edge in the AI race, well-funded startups commonly find it’s simply faster to buy another company than try to build out certain technologies themselves.

The biggest financing of the week went to Castelion, a defense tech startup developing a hypersonic missile. Other sizable rounds went to companies developing AI inference technology, a video-creation platform, data centers and voice-to-text tools.

Massive AI spending has helped push earnings and valuations for semiconductor industry leaders to record levels, prompting the sector's giants to invest record sums in artificial intelligence and robotics startups.

Startups raised funding rounds with a lot of zeroes at the end this week, with three companies securing financings of $1 billion or more. Additionally, a robust lineup of companies in sectors including AI, e-commerce, cybersecurity, biotech and even mining also announced sizable new rounds.

We identified popular themes for seed-stage investment this year, including cancer therapeutics and space tech.

Another week, another bevy of big rounds. The largest round was a reported $5 billion Nvidia-backed financing for foundational AI unicorn Safe Superintelligence, followed by a $1 billion investment in Commonwealth Fusion Systems.