The Biggest Startup Funding Rounds of Early 2026

Q1 2026 saw a notable concentration of capital into three sectors: AI infrastructure, energy and nuclear technology, and privacy and identity. The largest rounds were not spread evenly across the market — they clustered around companies solving problems that require significant capital expenditure. AI networking and compute infrastructure attracted multiple rounds above $100M. Nuclear and energy technology saw its largest quarter since the cleantech boom of 2008. And identity protection emerged as a surprise category, with Cloaked closing a $375M Series B. Total venture deployed in Q1 2026 is tracking roughly 25% above Q1 2025, driven almost entirely by these mega-rounds at the top end.

1. Valar Atomics — $450M Venture round. Isaiah Taylor, El Segundo. Nuclear energy company backed by Snowpoint. THE NEW ATOMIC AGE is their tagline and the round size backs it up. 2. Cloaked — $375M Series B. Arjun Bhatnagar, Lowell MA. Fighting surveillance and identity theft. Backed by General Catalyst. One of the largest Series B rounds in cybersecurity history. 3. Saviynt — $700M Series B. Sachin Nayyar, Hawthorne CA. AI-powered identity governance. Backed by KKR. Enterprise security at massive scale. 4. Eridu AI — $200M Series A. Drew Perkins, Los Gatos. Networking purpose-built for AI. One of the largest Series A rounds of the quarter. 5. Axiom Math — $200M Series A. Carina Hong, Stanford. AI reasoning. Two $200M Series A rounds from Menlo Ventures-backed companies in the same quarter. 6. Starcloud — $170M Series A. Philip Johnston, Redmond. Data centres in space. Backed by Benchmark. Space infrastructure is attracting real capital. 7. Wonderful — $150M Series B. Bar Winkler, Tel Aviv. Deploy AI agents anywhere work happens. Backed by Insight Partners. 8. Latent Health — $80M Series A. Sriram Somasundaram, San Francisco. Clinical AI for medication access. Healthcare AI commanding larger rounds. 9. Gimlet Labs — $80M Series A. Omid Azizi, Stanford. Next-generation computing transformation. Backed by Menlo Ventures. 10. Sycamore — $65M Seed. Sri Viswanath, Palo Alto. Enterprise agent OS. Backed by Lightspeed. One of the largest seed rounds ever.

When a company raises $100M or more, the vendor implications are fundamentally different from a $10M round. At this scale, the company is not evaluating whether to hire an agency — they are evaluating which three agencies to hire. They are not choosing between two CRM tools — they are implementing a full revenue operations stack. The procurement timeline is also different. Companies with mega-rounds typically hire a VP of Operations or Chief of Staff within 30 days of closing, and that person's first job is to stand up the vendor infrastructure. This creates a secondary outreach window: reach the founder in week one, then reach the ops hire in week four. Both are reachable through JustRaised.

Several investors appear repeatedly in the largest rounds of early 2026. Menlo Ventures backed both Axiom Math ($200M) and Gimlet Labs ($80M). Benchmark backed both Starcloud ($170M) and Gumloop ($50M). a16z backed GitButler ($17M) and Treeline ($25M). Spark Capital backed Latent Health ($80M) and Shepherd ($42M). Lightspeed backed Sycamore ($65M) and Avec ($8.4M). The pattern is clear: tier-one VCs are doubling down on AI infrastructure and developer tools. If you are selling to funded startups, filtering by these investors in JustRaised gives you a curated list of companies that have been vetted by the most demanding investors in the market.