January 2026 Report
Are you Concentrating?
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January 2026 was defined by a single number: $20 billion. Elon Musk’s xAI raised the largest venture round in history, representing 46% of all capital deployed globally during the month. This gravitational pull reshaped every metric. Remove xAI from the data and January looks like a normal month. Include it and the record books need rewriting.
Executive Summary
January delivered $43.1 billion across 639 rounds, shattering monthly records. But the headline number misleads without context: xAI’s $20B Series E alone exceeds most quarterly totals. Excluding xAI, the month deployed $23.1 billion, a strong start to 2026 but not historic. AI and robotics dominated deal flow. Autonomous vehicle companies (Waabi, Skild AI), AI infrastructure plays (xAI, humans&, Ricursive Intelligence), and enterprise AI (Decagon, Parloa, ClickHouse) captured the largest rounds.
Total Capital Deployed: $43.1 Billion
Total Excluding xAI: $23.1 Billion
Deal Volume: 639 Companies / Rounds
Active Investors: 2,333
Average Round Size: $67.4 Million
Median Round Size: $8.5 Million
Investment by stage
Late Stage (E+) rounds captured an astonishing $21.3 billion due to xAI, making stage comparisons meaningless. More instructive: Series C saw $6.8 billion across just 39 companies, driven by Singapore’s DayOne ($2B) and Pittsburgh-based Skild AI ($1.4B). Series A maintained healthy activity with 157 rounds totaling $4.4 billion, suggesting the early-stage pipeline is still working.
The gap between average and median round sizes tells the concentration story. At Series C, the average round was $174M while the median was $70M. A handful of mega-rounds pulled up every stage average.
Geographic distribution
US capital by state
California captured 78.2% of US startup capital in January, the highest concentration we have recorded. Palo Alto, where xAI is headquartered, drove almost all of it. Pennsylvania emerged as the surprise second-place state at 9.7%, thanks to Skild AI’s $1.4B round in Pittsburgh. Massachusetts (5.6%) and New York (2.6%) rounded out the top four.
Global capital by city
Palo Alto dominated global funding with $204.9 billion, entirely attributable to xAI. Remove that outlier and San Francisco ($20.6B) leads, followed by Toronto ($13B from Waabi’s $750M) and Cambridge, MA ($12.6B, mostly biotech). Singapore’s $4.2B reflects DayOne’s emergence as a regional heavyweight. The Bay Area’s combined total (Palo Alto + San Francisco + Redwood City + Mountain View + South San Francisco + San Mateo + Santa Clara) exceeded $238 billion.
Key trends and observations
1. The sovereign wealth surge
xAI’s $20B round brought sovereign wealth funds into venture at a scale we haven’t seen before. Qatar Investment Authority, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and strategic investors like NVIDIA and Tesla participated alongside traditional funds like Fidelity. The same pattern showed up at Waabi ($750M), where Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, BlackRock, and sovereign-adjacent entities like Export Development Canada joined the cap table. Sovereign wealth has arrived as a venture asset class.
2. The “mega-seed” phenomenon continues
Following December’s $475M Unconventional AI round, January produced two more mega-seeds: humans& ($480M) and Merge Labs ($252M). The humans& syndicate reads like a who’s who of Silicon Valley: SV Angel, Georges Harik, Jeff Bezos, Google Ventures, NVIDIA, Felicis, DCVC, CRV. Merge Labs, a gaming/metaverse infrastructure play, was led by OpenAI with participation from Gabe Newell (Valve) and Bain Capital. These are not seed rounds in any traditional sense. They are Series A or B rounds labeled as seeds.
3. Autonomous everything
Skild AI ($1.4B Series C, led by SoftBank) is building a “foundation model for robotics.” SignalRank is an investor in Skild’s B round. Waabi ($750M Series C) is Uber’s bet on autonomous trucking. DayOne ($2B Series C, led by Coatue) is applying autonomy to vertical-specific problems in Singapore. What connects them: investors believe general-purpose AI models will unlock autonomous systems across industries. The valuations imply conviction that these companies will capture meaningful chunks of trillion-dollar markets.
4. Enterprise AI hits hypergrowth
Decagon ($250M Series D) for AI customer service, Parloa ($350M Series D) for contact center AI, ClickHouse ($400M Series D) for real-time analytics, and OpenEvidence ($250M Series D) for clinical AI all raised growth rounds. The same investor names keep appearing (Coatue, General Catalyst, Index, Thrive), which suggests a coordinated thesis: enterprise AI is now proven enough for scale-up capital.
Top 10 deals of the month by capital raised
Capital concentration analysis
Capital concentration was extreme in January. Single deals dominated entire stages.
xAI represented 93.9% of all Late Stage capital. At Series C, DayOne and Skild AI together captured 50% of stage capital. Even at Seed, humans& and Merge Labs combined for nearly 30% of all seed investment. The portfolio construction implication is stark: missing a single mega-round can define fund performance for a vintage.
Investor analysis: the repeat players
Several investors appeared across multiple January mega-rounds:
NVIDIA / NVentures: xAI, humans&, Waabi, Skild AI, OpenEvidence, Ricursive Intelligence
Coatue: DayOne, Skild AI, Decagon, OpenEvidence
Lightspeed Venture Partners: Skild AI, ClickHouse, Rain, Ricursive Intelligence, Orca Bio
Sequoia Capital: Skild AI, OpenEvidence, Ricursive Intelligence
Felicis: Skild AI, humans&, Ricursive Intelligence
Google Ventures: humans&, Parabilis Medicines, OpenEvidence
NVIDIA’s venture arm has become the common denominator in AI infrastructure deals, appearing in six of the top 20 rounds. This reflects both NVIDIA’s strategic interest in AI ecosystem companies and their access advantage through customer relationships.
SignalRank Series B analysis
In the SignalRank methodology, a company “qualifies” not just by revenue or hype, but by the quality of its backers across all rounds to Series B. The core thesis: top-tier Seed and Series A investors have persistent access to the best outliers and Series B investors concentrate into the best.
January produced 11 SignalRank-qualifying Series B companies. Northwood Space achieved a perfect 100th percentile score with its $100M round for spacecraft ground infrastructure.
SignalRank invested in Northwood Space and Cambium.
Summary of trends
1. The “xAI effect”
One company’s $20B round distorted every January metric. This is the new reality of venture: a single company can represent nearly half of global deployment in a given month. For data analysis, medians and xAI-adjusted figures are now more instructive than raw totals.
2. Sovereign wealth goes mainstream
QIA, ADIA, MGX, GIC, and various sovereign-adjacent entities appeared across the largest January rounds. These are not one-off investments. They represent a structural shift. Sovereign wealth funds are now direct participants in venture at scale, competing with rather than through traditional VCs.
3. The robotics moment
Skild AI ($1.4B), Waabi ($750M), humans& ($480M), and DayOne ($2B) all bet on some form of autonomous systems. January 2026 may mark the inflection point where robotics and autonomy moved from speculative to fundable at growth-stage scale. The foundation model thesis that transformed software is now being applied to the physical world.
Data sourced from SignalRank with help from Crunchbase and Preqin. Analysis covers announced rounds from January 1-29, 2026.
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