Daily · 16 May 2026

Top 100 AI Startups That Raised in 2026 H1

Ranked from 100 down to 1. Generated by /lad, illustrated by /iad.

Explore Diagram Explore as app Share

Raised the largest private funding round in tech history in 2026 H1 — a $40B SoftBank-led round at a $300B+ post-money valuation. Powers ChatGPT, GPT-5.5, Sora 2, and Codex.

Closed an additional Series E in 2026 H1 at a $150-180B valuation. Maker of Claude (Opus 4.7, Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5), Claude Code, and Managed Agents (launched April 2026).

Elon Musk's xAI raised at a $80B+ valuation in 2026 H1 to scale Grok and the Colossus 2 training cluster. Aggressive infrastructure spend on Memphis GPUs.

Raised at a $20B+ valuation as it scaled Perplexity Comet (the AI-native browser) and Sonar API. Pivoted heavily toward agentic search in 2026.

Closed a French/EU sovereign-AI round in 2026 H1 at a €15B+ valuation. Mistral Large 3 and the Codestral model family ship as open-weights.

Anysphere (Cursor)

Raised at a $10B+ valuation as Cursor hit $2B ARR in February 2026. The reference VS-Code-fork AI IDE for power users.

Cognition (Devin)

Raised at a $10B+ valuation. Maker of Devin — the most-autonomous async cloud coding agent. Acquired Windsurf assets after the Anthropic deal.

Enterprise AI search and assistant. Raised at a $10B+ valuation in 2026 H1; one of the fastest-growing enterprise SaaS companies of the cycle.

Legal AI assistant for elite law firms. Raised at a $5B+ valuation in 2026 H1; deep penetration of AmLaw 100 firms.

Bret Taylor's conversational AI platform for customer experience. Raised at a $10B valuation in 2026 H1.

Long-context model lab building 100M+ context-window coding agents. Closed a follow-on round in 2026 H1 to scale training.

GPU cloud and open-source-model inference. Raised at a $3B+ valuation in 2026 H1 to expand H200/B200 fleet.

GPU cloud aimed at researchers and AI startups. Raised at a $4B+ valuation; long-term GPU contracts with OpenAI and others.

Hyperscaler-grade GPU cloud — public since 2025 but raised additional private growth funding in early 2026 ahead of further expansion.

Sustainable GPU data centres powered by stranded energy. Raised at a $5B+ valuation in 2026 H1 to build out giga-scale capacity.

Safety-focused healthcare LLM provider for non-diagnostic clinical roles. Raised at $2B+ in 2026 H1 to expand 'agent staff' rollout.

Codebase-aware AI coding assistant for enterprise monorepos. Raised at $1B+ valuation in 2026 H1.

Consumer AI video generation tool. Raised an additional round in 2026 H1 to expand Pikaffects library and mobile distribution.

AI music generation platform. Raised at a $3B+ valuation in 2026 H1; v4.5 model launched alongside the round.

Voice AI platform — TTS, voice cloning, dubbing, conversational. Raised at a $5B+ valuation in 2026 H1.

AI video generation platform — Gen-4.5, Act-One, Aleph. Raised at a $5B+ valuation in 2026 H1 to grow enterprise and Hollywood deals.

Inference platform with thousands of open-source models exposed via simple HTTP APIs. Closed a Series C in 2026 H1.

Low-latency inference platform — particularly strong on image and video models. Raised an A in 2026 H1 to expand realtime offerings.

Enterprise-focused foundation-model lab. Raised at a $7B+ valuation in 2026 H1 for further multilingual and RAG-focused product work.

Builder of action-prediction transformer-based agents (ACT). Raised follow-on growth in 2026 H1 after a long product reset.

Cloud IDE with the Replit Agent 4 autonomous coder. Raised at a $3B+ valuation in 2026 H1 to grow the Agent and Reserved Compute lines.

Closed a growth round in 2026 H1 valuing the company in the $10B+ range. Vercel AI SDK and v0 dominate front-end AI tooling.

Spec-first coding platform — author specs, the agent generates and maintains code against them. Closed Series A in 2026 H1.

Customer-support AI agents for enterprise. Raised at $2B+ valuation in 2026 H1 with major retailers and tech-co deployments.

Stockholm-based AI assistant for knowledge work. Raised at $1B+ valuation in 2026 H1.

Enterprise AI avatar/video platform. Closed a $2B+ valuation round in 2026 H1 with deep L&D customer base.

Top-ranked avatar-and-talking-head video generator. Raised at $1.5B+ valuation in 2026 H1.

Protein design AI for biotech R&D. Closed a $200M+ round in 2026 H1 to expand bench-and-cloud platform.

Isomorphic Labs

Alphabet-owned but raised external capital in 2026 H1 for AI drug discovery. AlphaFold-derived pipeline with Big Pharma partnerships.

RNA-design AI lab. Raised in 2026 H1 to scale mRNA design platform for therapeutics partners.

Federated-learning healthcare AI. Closed a 2026 H1 round for trial-acceleration platform and oncology programs.

Real-time data and reactive RAG infrastructure for agentic systems. Raised Series B in 2026 H1.

Weights & Biases

ML experiment tracking that pivoted into agent evaluation. Acquired by CoreWeave in 2026; pre-acquisition raise included.

Closed a Series B in 2026 H1 to scale LangSmith observability and LangGraph platform. Most-installed agent-framework SDK in production.

Data framework for RAG and agentic systems. Closed an A in 2026 H1 alongside enterprise-traction milestones.

Managed vector database. Raised a 2026 H1 extension as it absorbed serverless-vector workload from competitors.

Open-source vector database company. Raised in 2026 H1 to expand managed Qdrant Cloud offering.

Hosted RAG-as-a-service. Closed a B in 2026 H1 ahead of expansion into enterprise compliance verticals.

Serverless GPU/CPU runtime targeted at AI workloads. Closed a 2026 H1 round to scale GPU pool and Sandboxes product.

Model deployment and inference platform. Closed a B in 2026 H1; strong fit for inference of fine-tuned open models.

Maker of the Mojo language and the MAX inference engine. Closed a follow-on round in 2026 H1 for MAX rollout.

LPU-based ultra-low-latency inference. Closed a 2026 H1 round at $5B+ post; rapid expansion of cloud and on-prem footprint.

SambaNova Systems

AI accelerator + inference cloud. Closed growth funding in 2026 H1 ahead of enterprise deployments at Saudi Aramco and others.

Cerebras Systems

Wafer-scale AI accelerator company. Raised privately in 2026 H1 to fund Andromeda 2 supercomputer and inference cloud.

Specialised transformer-ASIC startup (Sohu). Closed an A/B in 2026 H1 to scale silicon production.

Open-source AI processor company. Closed a 2026 H1 round to expand Wormhole and Blackhole product lines.

Mistral Compute

Mistral's sovereign-AI infrastructure spin-out. Raised in 2026 H1 to build EU-based training and inference capacity.

Multimodal foundation-model lab (Reka Core, Flash). Closed a B in 2026 H1 with strategic enterprise investors.

Jamba family of long-context models. Raised in 2026 H1 to extend enterprise SaaS (AI21 Studio) and Maestro agentic platform.

Reformed enterprise-AI play after the Microsoft team move. Raised in 2026 H1 around a personal-AI 'Pi for enterprise' pivot.

Hippocrates / Pearl Health

Healthcare value-based-care + AI platform. Raised at $1B+ valuation in 2026 H1 to scale physician-network deployments.

Clinical voice assistant for physicians — ambient documentation. Closed a 2026 H1 round in a competitive medical-AI category.

Clinical-documentation AI competitor to Suki. Raised at $5B+ valuation in 2026 H1 with major health-system rollouts.

Workflow-automation agent for sales and ops teams. Closed a round in 2026 H1 to expand chrome-extension and 'Agent' product.

Personal-assistant agent platform — email, scheduling, research. Raised at $500M+ in 2026 H1.

Browser-acting AI agent. Closed an A in 2026 H1 to scale enterprise pilots and Agent OS rollout.

Contact-centre AI for real-time agent assist. Raised at $2B+ valuation in 2026 H1.

Conversation-intelligence platform for contact centres. Raised in 2026 H1 to extend agent-assist features into post-call workflows.

Enterprise generative-AI platform with own model family. Closed a $200M+ round in 2026 H1 at a $1.9B valuation.

AI presentation and storytelling platform pivoting to enterprise sales-tools. Raised in 2026 H1 alongside major enterprise pivot.

AI personal-knowledge tool — memory + assistant in one. Raised at $200M+ in 2026 H1.

Productivity + notes app with Claude-powered assistant. Closed a round in 2026 H1.

AI meeting-notes app — pre-meeting briefs + post-meeting summaries. Closed Series B in 2026 H1 at $1B+ valuation.

Voice meeting-intelligence platform with enterprise expansion. Closed funding in 2026 H1.

AI meeting note-taker with summaries, action items, and integration sprawl. Raised in 2026 H1.

Realtime creative generation suite. Closed an A in 2026 H1 to expand realtime video and image-edit features.

Audio-driven character video generation. Raised in 2026 H1 alongside the Character-3 model launch.

Cinematic-camera-motion-focused AI video tool. Closed a B in 2026 H1 to scale Soul and DoP product lines.

Long-form-to-short-form AI video editor. Closed a follow-on round in 2026 H1 with strong content-marketer adoption.

Mobile-first AI video editor — strong on creator tooling. Closed a B in 2026 H1.

Audio + video editor with Underlord agent. Closed funding in 2026 H1 alongside Underlord 2 launch.

Generative UI design platform. Closed a round in 2026 H1 with figma-first creator focus.

AI design-to-code platform — Figma-style canvas plus React export. Raised in 2026 H1.

Bolt.new (StackBlitz)

Web app builder with hot reload preview. Closed a 2026 H1 round; viral growth among indie founders.

Non-technical full-stack app builder. Closed a B in 2026 H1 at a $1.8B+ valuation alongside rapid revenue growth.

Search API optimised for agentic consumption. Closed a 2026 H1 round to expand enterprise tier.

Neural search for AI agents. Raised in 2026 H1 alongside the Exa Websets enterprise product.

Search-engine-style coding assistant. Closed a 2026 H1 round ahead of broader 'agentic Q&A' positioning.

AI search and assistant company. Raised in 2026 H1 to scale enterprise multi-tenant offering.

Multi-model verification network — runs the same prompt across multiple models and resolves disagreement. Raised in 2026 H1.

EigenLayer (AI subnet)

Restaking infra that's increasingly powering decentralised-AI training networks. Closed extension funding in 2026 H1.

Bittensor (TAO)

Decentralised AI compute and model marketplace. Raised in 2026 H1 alongside subnet expansion across foundation models.

Prime Intellect

Decentralised AI training infrastructure. Closed a 2026 H1 round to scale the INTELLECT distributed training stack.

Together / Nous Research

Open-model research collective + Together's Hermes line. Raised in 2026 H1 alongside the Hermes 4 release.

01.AI (Kai-Fu Lee)

Yi-Lightning foundation models from China. Closed funding in 2026 H1 amid intensifying US-China model export-control tension.

Chinese frontier-model lab whose efficient training approaches reset the cost-curve conversation. Continued private funding in 2026 H1.

Kimi K2 model and consumer assistant. Closed 2026 H1 funding amid Chinese model-lab consolidation.

Chinese foundation-model lab with the GLM family. Closed a round in 2026 H1 with state-backed investment.

MiniMax (Hailuo)

Hailuo video and abab text models. Closed a round in 2026 H1 with consumer-app + API revenue both ramping.

Japan-based AI research lab pioneering evolutionary model-merging. Closed a 2026 H1 round to expand R&D and product surface.

ElevenLabs Conversational

ElevenLabs' agentic voice product line. The 2026 H1 raise specifically funded the voice-agents platform expansion.

AI sales reps as a service — autonomous SDR avatars. Closed Series B at $1B+ valuation in 2026 H1.

AI-powered GTM data platform — sales prospecting and enrichment. Closed funding in 2026 H1.

AI talent marketplace and contractor platform. Closed funding in 2026 H1 alongside rapid revenue growth.

Smithery (MCP hub)

MCP server hosting and distribution platform. Closed a 2026 H1 round as the MCP ecosystem hit critical mass with 1200+ servers.

01

Lv 1 · Browser0 pts

0 / 100 to Lv 2+1 / 200px scrolled

Theme

Display

Density