Where the money actually went
The shape of the funding market, taken from the quarterly reports themselves. Read by a person, on purpose.
Two companies, 43% of the market
OpenAI and Anthropic together took $217B of the $510B raised by every startup on earth in the first half of 2026. Anthropic's $65B round made it the most valuable private company in the world.
Global startup funding
First half of 2026, against $440B for the whole of 2025. Q1 was $305B, Q2 $205B across more than 5,000 startups.
The AI valuation gap
Median Series A pre-money for an AI foundational-model company against a non-AI company at the same stage. Carta's own reading: these are not comparable markets.
AI share of venture dollars
Over 60 cents of every venture dollar invested on Carta went to AI companies — the highest share recorded. Within SaaS specifically it was 83%.
Down-round rate
Down from a 22% peak in 2023, and back in line with 2019 and 2020. The three-year hangover from the 2022 valuation reset is over.
Pre-seed is concentrating
US startups raised $3.19B across more than 11,500 pre-seed instruments. A year earlier it was almost exactly the same money — $3.22B — across 14,825. Same capital, three thousand fewer bets.
Why this board is not automated
The AI board refreshes itself. This one cannot, and the reason is worth stating plainly.
Carta and Crunchbase are the primary sources here, and neither publishes an open API. What they publish is prose, and the numbers that matter sit inside sentences that punish a parser. Crunchbase wrote that sixteen companies raised billion-dollar rounds “totalling $108.6 billion, or 53% of second-quarter funding”. That is megaround concentration. Three aggregators I checked reprinted it as AI’s share of funding, which it is not, and a regex pointed at that sentence would have put the same error on this page automatically.
So a script watches for a new quarterly report and opens an issue when one lands. A person reads it and edits the numbers. Each row is dated, and carries the quarter it describes, so a figure that has gone stale looks stale rather than passing itself off as current.