Funding rounds of over $100 million were once extremely rare. Now, more than 40% of seed and Series A rounds cross that threshold

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I’ve become utterly indifferent to AI funding figures.

A decade ago, even five years back, a colossal seed round worth hundreds of millions was unimaginable. Now, it’s started to seem rather commonplace to me—and the data indeed confirms my apathy: Crunchbase recently determined that, thus far in 2026, over 40% of seed and Series A investments have been channeled into rounds of $100 million or more. 

Examples from the past few weeks are Humans& (a leading-edge AI lab that secured a $480 million seed round), Ricursive Intelligence (which raised a $300 million Series A), and Merge Labs, Sam Altman’s brain-computer interface firm that bagged a casual $252 million seed round.

Naturally, this sentiment isn’t solely focused on early-stage companies. I really don’t know if there’s any funding round figure that would truly astonish me now. It’s a never-ending string of headlines with big numbers, with no clue where all this is heading, particularly concerning the biggest players in the field. 

Just this week, reports emerged that SoftBank is in discussions to invest an additional $30 billion in OpenAI (after having previously invested $40 billion), and then there was the xAI news—that .

Musk’s companies have always been interlinked financially in a somewhat insular manner, but the truth is: All these AI startups and companies are investing in and selling to each other. This is something . 

So, there aren’t any numbers that surprise me anymore. And that concerns me. Because that might mean the only thing that would be startling is a downturn.

ICYMI… It’s been a significant earnings week for Big Tech. Some highlights are , . Meanwhile, Microsoft’s .

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
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