The gist: Global venture funding in October totaled $59 billion, a 45% jump from a year earlier, per Crunchbase data, in large part due to a record-setting $15.9 billion funding round for China’s DeepSeek.
The gist: Record venture funding in 2026 has been increasingly concentrated in massive AI rounds, while seed- and early-stage deal counts are on the decline. Using Crunchbase data we provide a look at how third-quarter funding continued the year's dollars-up-but-deals-down trend.
The gist: This week featured a robust lineup of large rounds, led by manufacturing startup Re:Build, which closed on $2.1 billion, and predictions marketplace Kalshi, which picked up another $1 billion.
The gist: Travel demand appears to be holding up, but at the same time, investor appetite for travel tech startups has cooled. Even a wave of startups promising to improve travel with AI hasn’t managed to reverse the funding slowdown. We share what a review of Crunchbase data shows.
The gist: Crunchbase data shows that so far this year, investors have poured around $48 billion into financings around the Series B stage, the highest tally in years. Yet round counts are below year-ago levels and are on track for a multiyear low. We take a look at the data.
The gist: AI megarounds are masking a shrinking Series A market, leaving seed founders facing higher revenue expectations and longer timelines despite larger seed checks. To improve their chances, MGV's Marc Schröder says, founders should size their seed funding around Series A milestones.
The gist: Numeracle, a McLean, Virginia-based company that verifies businesses and links their identities to the phone numbers they use to contact customers, has raised $28 million from Edison Partners to help businesses whose calls are incorrectly labeled as spam or blocked by phone carriers.
The gist: Revenue growth does not guarantee a larger exit, as declining valuation multiples can outweigh operating gains and reduce enterprise value. Guest author Itay Sagie suggests that founders and boards should track valuation alongside financial performance, model the effects of delaying a sale, and begin M&A preparation wh
The gist: After living as a monk while managing Graves’ disease, a former Facebook engineer left Big Tech to pursue meaningful work, eventually founding government software startup FSH Technologies which aims to improve processes such as school food services and public records management through the use of artificial intelligenc
The gist: Venture funding to robotics startups has soared in 2026, with the bulk of investment going to companies based in China and the U.S., Crunchbase data shows. All told, global venture funding to robotics startups totaled $9.9 billion in Q3, more than double the $4.3 billion invested in Q3 2025, per Crunchbase data.
The gist: Scaling AI agents requires treating them like employees in regulated roles, with written rules, clearly defined responsibilities and a named human manager accountable for their performance. Guest author Rick Folgmann, COO at Get Covered, tells companies they should start with tasks governed by established rules, adjust
The gist: In an S-1 filing today preceding what could be the largest IPO ever, Anthropic laid out extensive new details about its earnings, growth, key stakeholders and the risks it faces going forward. Clocking in at 335 pages, the document wasn’t exactly light reading. However, in a preliminary once-over, we highlight some of
The gist: False claims about customers, revenue and AI capabilities can expose founders to personal securities-fraud liability, with D&O insurance offering limited protection against established misconduct. Guest author Kyle Jeziorski of Founder Shield shares three policy provisions that need close attention from founders.
The gist: California companies have scooped up more than three-fourths of all U.S. startup funding this year. That, per Crunchbase data, is an apparent record share. And keep in mind: This year still has a couple months left.
The gist: It was another interesting week for AI-related startup funding, with a number of large rounds and quirky companies. The largest financings went to Tenstorrent, a developer of AI processors and systems, and AI lab Flapping Airplanes. The quirkiest round, meanwhile, was undoubtedly a $200 million financing for Warhound,
The gist: AI agents create new trade secret risks by allowing employees to access expertise or inadvertently expose proprietary information through personal devices. In this guest commentary, Seth Kugler, a partner at Grellas Shah LLP, warns companies that they should adopt strict AI policies, restrict data access on unmanaged d
The gist: From teaching robots to do everyday household chores to using lasers to track satellites in space, this month's crop of interesting startup deals spans some decidedly different corners of tech.
The gist: Slingshot Insurance, a Minneapolis-based AI-native embedded insurance startup, is emerging from stealth with $27 million in a seed funding round co-led by Rally Ventures and Skyward Group, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively.
The gist: In this guest article from Airrived co-founder and CEO Anurag Gurtu, he contends that Anthropic’s rapid revenue growth does not justify its proposed $2 trillion IPO valuation, given enormous infrastructure commitments, safety concerns, customer concentration and competition from cheaper open-weight models, saying inste
The gist: A number of companies whose names might feature on a playlist of 2021 boom-era unicorns have sold to acquirers in recent months, including one-time highfliers like Airtable, Headspace and Miro. In many cases, companies are selling at valuations which, while not puny, are still far below their former peaks.
The gist: As AI agents increasingly recommend and purchase products, brands must appeal to both machines and humans by documenting their voice, creating clear product descriptions and checking how AI summarizes their messaging. Guest author Toby Coulthard suggests that startups should build these practices in from the outset, pr
The gist: Startup acquisitions can reshape employees’ finances and careers, with individual outcomes depending on a variety of conditions. Guest author Ron Honig, co-CEO and managing partner of From-Honig Family Office, suggests that before making major life changes, employees should clarify their award rights, when proceeds wil
The gist: Crunchbase News spoke with James Kim, partner at Reach Capital, about how Reach’s education roots inform its broader strategy, what it saw in AI detection company GPTZero, and why some of its best investments initially divided its own team. We also discussed how ownership stakes and secondary transactions have shaped t
The gist: Founders can build billion-dollar businesses without venture capital by prioritizing customer revenue, pricing for quality, hiring exceptional talent and automating processes to scale efficiently, argues Nacho De Marco, who draws on his experience bootstrapping BairesDev, to emphasize financial discipline and a lasting
The gist: All told, fintech startups raised $10.6 billion globally in the third quarter of 2026, down 28.4% from $14.9 billion in Q2 2026 and 21.4% from $13.5 billion in Q3 2025.
The gist: A continued boom in late-stage and growth funding combined with a surge in seed-stage funding helped buoy venture investment in Latin America for the third quarter of 2026, Crunchbase data shows.
The gist: Enterprise AI companies relying on armies of forward deployed engineers are disguising labor-intensive services as scalable software, inflating recurring revenue and valuations while falling short of autonomy claims, argues Anurag Gurtu, co-founder and CEO of Airrived. In this guest commentary he urges buyers and inves
The gist: Startup investors aren’t exactly hitting pause, but they did scale back on giant rounds this past week, with just two startup financings in the multiple hundreds of millions.
The gist: Overall, investors put $38.5 billion into reported seed- through growth-stage financings for Asian startups in Q3, per Crunchbase data. Of that, a majority went to AI-focused companies, echoing the trends we’ve seen globally.
The gist: As AI enables smaller, faster teams, companies should hire curious, adaptable people who challenge established practices and can be trusted to make independent decisions, according to guest author Eric Francia, who writes that giving employees real responsibility, encouraging questions and investing in continuous learn
