Startup funding shatters all records in Q1

Global startup funding reached $297 billion in Q1 2026, a new single-quarter record according to Crunchbase.

The quarter's total was 2.5 times the prior quarter and exceeded any full year of VC activity before 2019.

Four mega-deals—OpenAI ($122B), Anthropic ($30B), xAI ($20B) and Waymo ($16B)—together raised $188 billion, over 63% of the quarter's funding.