As always you should know that this report is automated using a skill I developed for Claude. The report is run using OpenAI’s ChatGPT6 which manages claude agents through the process. As always I edit and validate afterwards and often re-write sections.
Executive Summary
August 2026 produced $38.84B of venture funding across 648 disclosed-size rounds. Capital is down 48.1% from July’s $74.84B and up 122.1% against August 2025’s $17.48B. The disclosed-size round count fell 26.6% from July and 34.4% from a year ago. So $17.48B in August 2025 had more rounds than $34.84B last month. Concentration is a real thing.
Almost all of the month-over-month move sits in the largest rounds. Nine rounds of at least $1B took $14.18B, or 36.5% of August capital. Excluding them, the market deployed $24.66B across 639 rounds, against $24.92B across 871 rounds in July on the same basis. That is a 1.0% difference. July’s headline was carried by a $28.33B corporate round for Paltac in Japan; August has no equivalent.
Underneath the top of the market, pricing barely moved. Median Series A was $15.00M against $14.77M in July, median Series B $30.00M against $29.52M, median Series C $82.50M against $82.30M and median Series D $66.00M against $65.00M. Four consecutive stage medians landing within a couple of percent of the prior month is unusual. The drop in the headline figure is a mega-round effect, not a market-wide repricing.
The geographic mix changed more than the price did. Asia took 38.2% of August capital, its highest share in the six-month window, on the back of a $4.69B semiconductor joint venture in Japan and a $1.22B automotive round in China. North America fell to 46.6%. Europe took 6.4%, its lowest share in the window.
Market Pulse
Headline figures for August 2026
Capital deployed: $38.84B, down 48.1% from July
Disclosed-size rounds: 648, down 26.6% from July
Companies funded: 647
Named investors participating: 2,267
Median round: $9.22M, up from $8.00M in July
Average round: $59.94M, down from $84.75M in July
The six-month series is dominated by whichever very large rounds happen to land inside a given month. Reading the same six months with rounds of $1B or more removed gives a much steadier picture:
March 2026: $30.38B
April 2026: $23.56B
May 2026: $22.77B
June 2026: $37.41B
July 2026: $24.92B
August 2026: $24.66B
On that basis August is the fourth month out of six to land between $22B and $25B. June is the outlier in the series, not August. Round counts have fallen more consistently than capital: 1,297 in March against 648 in August, though the most recent months are still accruing.
The ten largest rounds took 38.6% of August capital and the largest 100 took 83.7%, leaving 548 rounds to split the remaining 16.4%. Average round size falls from $59.94M to $38.60M once the nine billion-dollar rounds are excluded, and to $37.41M once the ten largest are excluded.
The largest round of the month was a $4.69B corporate round for Advanced Vision Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp JV in Koshi, Japan, roughly two and a half times the next largest. Tomago Aluminium Company raised $1.76B in Australia, Hadrian $1.37B in Torrance and Shenzhou Automotive Technology $1.22B in Wuhan. Of the nine rounds at or above $1B, four went to U.S. companies, two to China, and one each to Japan, Australia and Singapore. Five of the nine were corporate rounds or SAFEs rather than lettered venture rounds, which is why the stage table shows so much capital sitting outside the Series A to D ladder.
Crunchbase News covered the same month from its own dataset in Gené Teare’s Global Venture Funding Jumps 122% In August As Streak Of Billion-Dollar Deals Continues, published September 3, 2026, and covered July’s billion-dollar-round activity in A Record 13 Billion-Dollar Rounds In July Pushed Venture’s Historic Run Higher, published August 4, 2026. Both are worth reading alongside this report for the exit and valuation detail it does not cover.
Stage-by-Stage View
August had 1,022 eligible venture rounds in total, 648 of which disclosed a size. The table above shows both counts by stage. Capital, average and median columns use disclosed amounts only, so the disclosed count is the right denominator for any cheque-size reading and the total count is the right one for activity.
Corporate rounds were the largest single category at $9.40B, from only 31 disclosed-size rounds out of 98 total. That is the Japanese semiconductor joint venture, Shenzhou Automotive and Poolside. Series B followed at $5.30B across 69 disclosed-size rounds out of 84, and Series C at $5.25B across 38 out of 44. Series D recorded $4.39B across 21 disclosed-size rounds out of 24, and Series A $3.97B across 111 out of 155.
SAFEs recorded $3.74B from 25 disclosed-size rounds out of 51, which is again the top of the market rather than the early stage: Tomago Aluminium and Dymon Asia Capital both used that structure for rounds of $1B or more. Median disclosed SAFE size was $11.37M against $5.00M in July, a shift that comes from a handful of large instruments rather than from any change in ordinary seed practice.
‘Series Unknown’ is a classification we use when the actual round stage is not disclosed. It recorded $2.29B across 71 disclosed-size rounds out of 139. Series G recorded $1.30B from two rounds, and Series E $578M from four disclosed-size rounds out of five.
The early stage supplied volume rather than dollars. Seed and pre-seed together produced 411 eligible rounds, of which 272 disclosed a size. Those 272 rounds are 42.0% of the disclosed-size population but $1.87B, or 4.8% of capital. Median disclosed seed was $3.50M and median disclosed pre-seed $1.00M.
Median disclosed round sizes against July:
Series A: $15.00M, up from $14.77M; 155 total rounds with 111 disclosed, against 206 total with 170 disclosed
Series B: $30.00M, up from $29.52M; 84 total with 69 disclosed, against 98 total with 75 disclosed
Series C: $82.50M, up from $82.30M; 44 total with 38 disclosed, against 37 total with 30 disclosed
Series D: $66.00M, up from $65.00M; 24 total with 21 disclosed, against 21 total with all 21 disclosed
Seed: $3.50M, against $3.51M; 308 total with 195 disclosed, against 407 total with 290 disclosed
Series C is the only stage where the number of rounds rose against July. Everywhere else fewer companies raised at almost exactly the same prices.
Geography View
North America took 46.6% of August capital at $18.09B across 250 rounds, down 26.0% from July. Asia took 38.2% at $14.84B across 232 rounds, down 62.3% from a July figure that included the $28.33B Paltac round. Europe took 6.4% at $2.48B across 109 rounds, down 67.5% and its weakest share in the six-month window. Oceania took 4.8% at $1.87B, almost all of it the single Tomago Aluminium round.
Removing rounds of $1B or more changes the ranking materially. On that basis North America deployed $13.62B across 246 rounds and Asia $6.90B across 228 rounds, so Asia’s headline share is largely two very large transactions rather than broad-based strength. Europe is unchanged at $2.48B because it had no round of $1B or more in August at all.
U.S. companies raised $17.48B across 237 rounds, 46.3% of global capital. California took 67.0% of the U.S. total at $11.71B across 114 rounds. Texas is second at $1.93B across 15 rounds, helped by Base Power’s $1B round in Austin, then Massachusetts at $1.33B across 20 rounds, New York at $920.44M across 29 and Illinois at $378.00M across 3.
Texas ranking second on U.S. capital and Austin ranking fifth among U.S. cities on 11 rounds fits what Carta reports at the earliest stage. In its State of Pre-Seed: Q2 2026, published August 13, 2026, Carta places Texas second behind California on U.S. pre-seed cash and Austin third among metros, using its own US customer data and counting convertible instruments rather than priced rounds. Two different datasets on two different definitions are pointing at the same geographic shift.
Koshi, Japan leads every city in the world on capital from a single round. San Francisco led on volume with 51 rounds worth $3.38B, more than four times the round count of any other city on the capital leaderboard. Torrance recorded $2.17B from two rounds, Palo Alto $1.95B from eight and Austin $1.39B from 11. Outside the U.S., Singapore posted $1.75B across eight rounds, Shanghai $1.15B across nine and Mumbai $883.40M across ten. India produced 77 rounds, the third-highest count of any country, at $1.73B, or an average near $22M.
Who Is Winning
Sectors
Companies carry multiple sector tags, so these buckets overlap and do not sum to the market total. Science and Engineering led at $22.33B across 284 rounds, followed by Manufacturing at $14.92B across 89, Software at $13.94B across 273 and Hardware at $12.85B across 102.
Artificial Intelligence took $11.64B across 189 rounds, 30.0% of capital and 29.2% of disclosed-size rounds. That is a lower capital share than the AI-tagged share of recent months, and it is the direct consequence of August’s largest rounds going to semiconductor manufacturing, aluminium smelting, automotive and grid storage rather than to model and application companies.
Manufacturing and Hardware sitting second and fourth is the month’s most interesting sector result. Both are usually mid-table on capital. Between them they carry the Japanese semiconductor joint venture, Shenzhou Automotive, Hadrian and Yuanxin Satellite. Transportation at $6.28B across 60 rounds and Energy at $4.02B across 50 tell the same story from a different angle: physical infrastructure absorbed a large share of the very biggest cheques this month.
Health Care recorded $2.61B across 88 rounds and Biotechnology $2.07B across 48, both steady on volume at average round sizes near $30M and $43M.
Lead investors
547 of 648 rounds, or 84.4%, had a named lead. Those leads were spread across 610 distinct firms, 540 of which led exactly one round. Only 70 firms led two or more.
YZi Labs led seven rounds, more than any other firm, for $2.45M of total round value. General Catalyst led six rounds worth $1.27B, Sequoia Capital five worth $360.10M, and Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and S3 Ventures four each. The dollar figures behind these counts vary by three orders of magnitude: JP Morgan Chase and Valor Equity Partners each led two rounds worth $2.37B, more capital than any firm on the leaderboard, while S3 Ventures’ four rounds carried $63.05M.
Counting rounds led and counting dollars led produce almost entirely different rankings. Neither is wrong; they measure different businesses.
Repeat investors
326 investors participated in two or more rounds during the month, out of 2,262 distinct names, so about 14% of participating investors were repeat buyers.
Y Combinator appeared in 22 rounds, Andreessen Horowitz in 13 and General Catalyst in 12. Antler and Alumni Ventures appeared in nine each, Sequoia Capital in eight, and Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners, RA Capital Management and YZi Labs in seven each. Total round value behind those counts diverges sharply: Y Combinator’s 22 rounds carried $2.12B of round value against Andreessen Horowitz’s $5.43B from 13.
Where the experienced money went
SignalRank’s ‘Investor scores’ in this dataset are a relative ranking using a percentile, and most investor rows carry no score at all. The useful measure is therefore how often a highly ranked investor appears in a round. Taking the 100 highest-scoring investors in the data, their presence rises steadily with stage:
Pre-seed: 3.9% of rounds
Seed: 14.4% of rounds
Series A: 23.4% of rounds
Series B: 34.8% of rounds
Series D: 38.1% of rounds
Series C: 39.5% of rounds
Roughly two Series C rounds in five included a top-100 investor in August, against one pre-seed round in twenty-five. Corporate rounds and SAFEs show almost no top-100 participation, which reflects who is behind them. Emerging managers still play a huge role ar Pre-Seed and Seed and in SAFE investments.
SignalRank Qualifiers Snapshot
Seven companies met the SignalRank qualification standard on a Series B raised in August, up from three in July. Together they raised $865M, with a median round of $45M, across three countries.
Higgsfield raised $400M in San Francisco at the 94.7th percentile of the scored Series B cohort and Instinct raised $250M in San Francisco at the 91.1st. Heaviside Industries raised $60M in Los Angeles at the 95.0th, Yuno $45M in Bogotá at the 96.9th and Blacksmith $45M in San Francisco at the 83.1st. Multiplier raised $35M in Singapore at the 98.7th, the highest percentile of the group, and Ambrook $30M in New York at the 91.8th.
Seven qualifiers sits against 84 Series B rounds overall, 69 of which disclosed a size. The qualification standard is deliberately narrow. Four of the seven are U.S. companies and three are not, which is a wider geographic spread than the cohort usually shows.
What This Means For
VCs
The market you compete in depends on the cheque you write. If you write $1B cheques, August was a step down from July and the deals moved toward hard assets: semiconductors, smelting, automotive, grid storage. If you write $10M to $50M cheques, almost nothing changed. Median Series A, B, C and D all landed within a couple of percent of July.
That combination has a practical implication. When headline capital moves by half and stage medians do not move at all, the headline is not telling you anything about your own pricing environment. Track the ex-mega series and the stage medians instead.
Lead activity remains dispersed. 610 firms led at least one round and only 70 led more than one. No small group is setting terms across this market.
Founders
Fewer companies raised in August than in July, but the ones that did raised at the same prices. Median round size rose from $8.00M to $9.22M while the disclosed-size round count fell 26.6%. Comparables from July still hold at Series A through D.
Series C is the one stage where round counts rose against July, from 37 total to 44. If you are approaching a growth round, that is the part of the ladder with the most active demand right now.
If you are outside the U.S., volume is still there. India ran 77 rounds, the third-highest count of any country, and Shanghai, Singapore and Mumbai all appear on the global city capital leaderboard. Average round sizes in those markets are well below U.S. levels, so volume and cheque size remain separate questions.
If you are raising pre-seed on a convertible instrument, Carta’s State of Pre-Seed: Q2 2026 is the better reference than this report. It covers SAFEs and notes before a first priced round, which sit outside the priced-round population measured here.
LPs
The 36.5% of August capital that went into nine rounds is not accessible to most funds, and it is what drives the headline. When you read that venture funding is up 122% year over year, the relevant follow-up is what the market looked like without the largest rounds. On that basis monthly capital has sat between $22.77B and $37.41B since March, with four of six months between $22B and $25B.
Concentration is worth tracking as an exposure measure rather than a momentum signal. 83.7% of August capital went to 100 rounds. A vintage built in a month like this one will look very different depending on whether a manager was in that top tier or among the 548 rounds that split the remaining 16.4%.
One caution on the year-over-year figure. August 2025 was measured on a fully accrued population and August 2026 was measured five days after month end. The +122% comparison is real in direction, but the August 2026 side of it will grow.
Methodology and Data Notes
Round, investor, geography and sector data come from SignalRank’s funding round dataset. Headline, capital, geography and sector views require a disclosed amount, so their round counts describe disclosed-size rounds. The stage table separately shows total eligible rounds and disclosed-size rounds; its capital, average and median columns use disclosed amounts only. SignalRank qualifier data comes from SignalRank’s company history dataset, using the V4 qualification algorithms with a Series B date inside the month. Score at B in the qualifier table is the company’s percentile within the scored Series B cohort.
Capital totals deduplicate to one row per funding round before aggregation. The underlying table holds one row per investor per round, so summing without deduplication would overcount substantially. Round counts, company counts and investor counts all use distinct identifiers.
The report covers equity venture round types: SAFE, pre-seed, seed, Series A through Series I, series unknown, corporate rounds and undisclosed rounds.