Billion-Dollar Startup Funding Rounds Are Taking Over Venture Capital

Startup funding is no longer defined only by smaller bets on early promise. Per Crunchbase data, 60% of global startup funding so far this year — around $320 billion — went to rounds of $1 billion or more.

The data covers seed through growth-stage rounds for private companies founded in the past 20 years. These large rounds were a key factor in pushing global funding for the first half of the year to record levels.

U.S. funding is more heavily tilted toward billion-dollar-plus rounds than the global market. Crunchbase reports that 73% of U.S. funding this year has gone to these megadeals.

Of the $290 billion invested in U.S. billion-dollar-plus deals, just two rounds for AI leaders OpenAI and Anthropic account for more than half the total. That concentration makes AI a central lens for understanding today’s funding surge.

Billion-dollar-plus rounds are also becoming more frequent. So far this year, U.S. startups have closed 23 known rounds of $1 billion or more, putting 2026 already on par with 2025, described as a record-setting year.

These deals are generally later-stage rounds or corporate financings. Only two of this year’s billion-dollar-plus rounds cited by Crunchbase — Prometheus and World Labs — were seed or early-stage rounds.

The first American billion-dollar-plus venture round cited by Crunchbase was Uber’s $1.2 billion Series D in 2014. Other early recipients included SpaceX, Airbnb, Lyft, SoFi, Snap, Grail, WeWork, Fanatics and Argo AI.

Several went on to large public-market or market-cap outcomes, including SpaceX, Uber and Airbnb, while Argo AI and WeWork did not fare as well. The takeaway for investors is clear: very large rounds in prominent unicorns can be lucrative, but they are far from risk-free.