Over 90% Concentration in February Funding
The $177 billion month
This report was written by our suite of AI Agents using Claude Code as orchestrator
Three rounds broke the venture capital market in February. OpenAI raised $110 billion in a corporate round. Anthropic raised $30 billion in a Series G. Waymo raised $16 billion in a Series D. Combined, those three companies absorbed $156 billion -- 88% of all venture capital deployed globally during the month. Strip them out and February was a $21 billion month with 751 other rounds. That underlying number is roughly in line with November and December 2025.
Executive summary
February saw $177.4 billion deployed across 754 rounds into 753 companies, with 2,602 active investors. The numbers are historically unprecedented, but the story is really about three companies, not the broader market.
Total capital deployed: $177.4 billion
Total excluding OpenAI, Anthropic, and Waymo: $21.4 billion
Deal volume: 754 rounds across 753 companies
Active investors: 2,602
Average round size: $235.2 million
Median round size: $7.0 million
The gap between average ($235M) and median ($7M) is the widest we have recorded. It tells you everything about how concentrated February was.
6-month capital trend
The trailing six months show what February looked like in context. September through December 2025 settled into a $23-46 billion range. January 2026 spiked to $50.3 billion (mostly xAI’s $20B). February then tripled January.
The question going forward: are we entering a regime where one or two mega-rounds per month define the totals, or was February an anomaly? The honest answer is that nobody knows. What is clear is that AI foundation model companies now raise at a scale that used to be reserved for sovereign debt issuances.
Investment by stage
The stage breakdown is dominated by three categories that each carried a single outlier. Corporate rounds ($110.9B) means OpenAI. Series G ($30B) means Anthropic. Series D ($19.2B) is mostly Waymo with ElevenLabs and Wayve adding $1.7B between them.
Below the outliers, the early-stage market looks normal. Series A produced 184 rounds at $5.4 billion total, with a $15.9M median. Seed had 276 rounds at $1.4 billion with a $3M median. Pre-Seed added 106 rounds. Together, Seed and Pre-Seed represented 50.7% of all deal volume -- a healthy early-stage pipeline.
Series B activity was solid: 75 rounds totaling $4.5 billion, with a $30M median. MatX ($500M for AI chip hardware) was the standout. Series C had 27 rounds at $2.1B, with Skyryse ($300M for flight automation) and other companies contributing.
Geographic distribution
US capital by state
California’s share of US venture capital reached 95.9% in February, driven almost entirely by San Francisco and Mountain View (where OpenAI, Anthropic, and Waymo are headquartered). This is the highest concentration we have seen. New York was a distant second at 1.5%, with Texas, Washington, and Massachusetts each capturing less than half a percent.
Global capital by city
San Francisco absorbed $142.5 billion across 66 rounds -- OpenAI and Anthropic alone account for $140 billion of that. Mountain View (Waymo, plus several others) added $16.7 billion. After those two cities, New York ($2.5B, 49 rounds) and London ($1.9B, 35 rounds) led the global table.
The US captured $169.2 billion total, followed by China ($2.0B), the UK ($2.0B), India ($0.8B), and Germany ($0.4B). Mexico appeared in the top ten for the first time in recent months thanks to Kavak’s $300M Series F.
Who is winning
Sector breakdown
The raw sector numbers are misleading because the top four categories (AI, Software, Data and Analytics, Science and Engineering) all appear on OpenAI, Anthropic, and Waymo’s tags. With those three removed, the more informative sectors are Health Care ($3.1B), Hardware ($2.8B standalone), Manufacturing ($2.6B), Internet Services ($2.5B), and Financial Services ($2.4B).
Health Care’s $3.1 billion spread across 110 rounds, making it the most diversified sector by deal count. Financial Services had 107 rounds -- significant breadth, though lower total capital. AI remains the dominant theme, but the non-AI economy is raising money too.
Lead investor analysis
Accel led 9 rounds in February, more than any traditional VC firm, ranging from Anthropic to early-stage deals in India. Andreessen Horowitz led 8 rounds including Waymo and ElevenLabs. Peak XV Partners (formerly Sequoia India) led 7, reflecting continued India-focused activity.
A note on the data: Exel by Merak (18 leads) and AlphaLab (14) are accelerator programs that lead small rounds at volume. Their presence at the top of the lead count reflects the mechanics of accelerator batch investing, not the same kind of capital deployment as a Sequoia or Andreessen lead.
Repeat investors
Y Combinator appeared in 19 rounds during February, the most of any investor. Accel appeared in 12, Andreessen Horowitz in 12, General Catalyst in 11, Lightspeed in 11, and Bessemer in 10. This overlap cluster represents the firms that show up everywhere in February’s deal flow.
Bessemer, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Lightspeed, Accel, and Andreessen Horowitz all appeared in the Anthropic and/or Waymo cap tables, which inflates their total capital deployed. But their presence in 8-12 rounds each, including seed and Series A deals, reflects genuine breadth.
Smart money flow
Investor quality (measured by SignalRank’s percentile scoring) concentrated at Series B and Series C. Series B rounds attracted investors with an average score of 3,578 and 68 high-score (85th+ percentile) investors. Series C averaged 5,897 and had 29 high-score investors. Series A had 152 high-score investors -- the largest absolute count -- reflecting the volume of deals that attract experienced backers.
Pre-Seed investor scores remain low (average 50), which is expected: these rounds are led by angels, micro-funds, and first-time managers who have not yet built scoring track records.
Top 10 deals of the month
OpenAI (USA) - Corporate Round: $110.0B -- SoftBank, Amazon, and NVIDIA co-led
Anthropic (USA) - Series G: $30.0B -- Coatue, D.E. Shaw, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, GIC, ICONIQ, MGX co-led
Waymo (USA) - Series D: $16.0B -- Alphabet, DST Global, Dragoneer, Sequoia co-led
Wayve (UK) - Series D: $1.2B -- Balderton, Eclipse, SoftBank Vision Fund co-led
Cerebras Systems (USA) - Series H: $1.0B -- AI chip company
MatX (USA) - Series B: $500M -- AI hardware
Ayar Labs (USA) - Series E: $500M -- Optical I/O chips
ElevenLabs (USA) - Series D: $500M -- AI voice synthesis
Inertia (USA) - Series A: $450M -- Energy infrastructure
Vestwell (USA) - Series E: $385M -- Retirement savings platform
Capital concentration analysis
Concentration was extreme across every late-stage category. Corporate rounds: OpenAI alone was 99.2% of the category. Series G: Anthropic was 100%. Series D: the top three rounds (Waymo, Wayve, ElevenLabs) captured 92.2%. Even at Series E, the top three (Ayar Labs, Vestwell, SambaNova) captured 78.6%.
The earlier stages were more diffuse. Seed’s top three rounds captured only 12% of seed capital. Series A’s top three captured 19.7%. This is the normal shape of a functioning venture market -- concentration increases with stage.
SignalRank qualifiers snapshot
February produced 33 SignalRank-qualifying Series B companies(investor score at or above the 85th percentile). The top scorers were Heron Power (energy/manufacturing, $140M) and Braintrust (AI/software, $80M), both backed by Andreessen Horowitz.
The qualifying companies span AI hardware (MatX, Positron, Code Metal), AI software (Braintrust, Goodfire, Basis, Letter AI), robotics (Bedrock Robotics, Gather AI, Overland AI), security (VulnCheck, Reco), energy (Heron Power, Andercore), fintech (Bretton AI, Ownwell, Jump, Novig), legal (Lawhive), biotech (Turbine, Altesa, BreezeBio, Alaffia Health), and defense (Forerunner). 33 qualifiers is the highest single-month count we have reported since launching this newsletter.
What this means for
VCs
The mega-round syndicate list for Anthropic reads like a who’s-who: Coatue, D.E. Shaw, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, GIC, ICONIQ, MGX, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Blackstone, BlackRock. Waymo’s cap table includes Sequoia, Andreessen, Tiger Global, Silver Lake, Kleiner Perkins. These are no longer traditional venture syndicates -- they are blended allocations combining VC, crossover, sovereign, and PE capital. The practical effect for smaller VCs: Series D+ is increasingly closed to firms without existing board positions or strategic leverage.
The opportunity for smaller funds is the 751 rounds that were not OpenAI, Anthropic, or Waymo. The early-stage market (382 seed and pre-seed rounds) is where most VCs can still compete on sourcing, conviction, and speed.
Founders
February’s data shows that the capital markets are wide open for AI companies at any stage. MatX raised a $500M Series B. Inertia raised a $450M Series A for energy. Heron Power raised $140M at Series B for manufacturing. If your company touches AI or energy infrastructure, investor appetite is high and round sizes are growing.
For everyone else: the market is functional but selective. Health Care, Financial Services, and Commerce each produced dozens of rounds. You can raise, but round sizes at seed and Series A remain concentrated around $3M and $16M respectively, and you will compete for attention in a month where AI consumed most of the headlines.
LPs
The concentration numbers demand attention. Three rounds absorbed 88% of all capital deployed in February. An LP’s vintage-year returns now depend heavily on whether their GPs had allocation in OpenAI, Anthropic, or Waymo. Funds that participated in even one of those rounds will report dramatically different gross returns than funds that did not.
The broader question is whether this concentration is sustainable. These rounds are priced as if the AI foundation model market will produce multiple trillion-dollar companies. That might be correct. But the capital at risk is large enough that a single valuation reset could ripple across LP portfolios.
Methodology and data notes
Data sourced from SignalRank with help from Crunchbase and Preqin. Analysis covers announced rounds from February 1-28, 2026. Stage classifications follow Crunchbase categories (Pre-Seed, Seed, SAFE, Series A through Series H, Corporate Round, Undisclosed). Only rounds with disclosed amounts above zero are included. Post-IPO debt and equity rounds are excluded. Geographic data uses company headquarters location. Investor scoring uses SignalRank’s percentile-based system where 85th percentile and above indicates high-signal backers.
The trailing 6-month trend covers September 2025 through February 2026. All capital figures are in USD.
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