The State of Venture — July 2026
Eleven rounds of $1B or more took 54.5% of July’s capital. Remove them and the market underneath has not grown since February.
Executive Summary
July 2026 produced $53.41B of venture funding across 818 disclosed-size rounds. Capital is down 12.0% from June’s $60.66B and up 71.3% against July 2025’s $31.19B, while the disclosed-size round count fell 26.2% from June and 31.2% from a year ago.
Concentration is the month’s defining feature. Eleven rounds of at least $1B accounted for $29.09B, or 54.5% of all capital, up from six such rounds in June. The ten largest rounds took 52.6% and the largest 100 rounds took 85.0%, leaving 718 rounds to split the remaining 15.0%. Excluding rounds of $1B or more, the market deployed $24.33B across 807 rounds, down 35.6% from June’s $37.76B on the same basis and back inside the $22.09B to $30.45B range that held from February through May.
Blue Origin’s $10B round on July 8 is more than a third of the month’s mega-round capital on its own, and it is the reason Washington state ranks second in the U.S. behind California. Median round size rose from $5.0M to $9.0M even as deal count fell by more than a quarter, which is what happens when fewer companies raise and the ones that do raise larger amounts.
Market Pulse
Headline figures for July 2026
Capital deployed: $53.41B, down 12.0% from June
Disclosed-size rounds: 818, down 26.2% from June
Companies funded: 817
Named investors participating: 2,897
Median round: $9.0M, up from $5.0M in June
Average round: $65.30M
The six-month series carries one distortion worth naming. February 2026 shows $197.61B because OpenAI ($122B), Anthropic ($30B) and Waymo ($16B) all closed inside the same four weeks. Every other month in the window sits between $36B and $61B.
Reading the same six months with rounds of $1B or more removed gives a steadier picture:
February 2026: $24.64B
March 2026: $30.45B
April 2026: $22.55B
May 2026: $22.09B
June 2026: $37.76B
July 2026: $24.33B
On that basis July is down 35.6% from June and sits near the February and April levels. June, not July, is the outlier in that series. What moves the headline from month to month is how many very large rounds happen to close, and July had eleven against June’s six.
Average round size falls from $65.30M to $30.14M once the eleven billion-dollar rounds are excluded, and to $31.34M once the ten largest rounds are excluded.
Blue Origin’s $10B was the largest round of the month by a factor of two, followed by Safe Superintelligence at $5B, Kling AI at $2.8B and Helsing at $1.8B. Six of the ten largest rounds went to U.S. companies, two to Germany, one to China and one to Singapore. Across all eleven rounds of $1B or more, the split is seven U.S., two German, one Chinese and one Singapore.
For additional perspective on July’s largest financings, see Gené Teare’s Crunchbase News analysis, Data: Billion-Dollar Rounds Set Global Funding Record In July 2026, published August 4, 2026.
Stage-by-Stage View
Series Unknown was the largest single category at $14.20B across 93 disclosed-size rounds out of 154 total, which is entirely a mega-round effect: Blue Origin’s $10B and Atoms’ $1.7B both sit there. Corporate rounds followed at $8.08B across 39 disclosed-size rounds out of 121, carried by Safe Superintelligence. SAFEs came next at $5.59B across 38 disclosed-size rounds out of 85, which is unusual for what is normally an early-stage instrument, but Kling AI’s $2.8B and Joulent’s $1.75B were both structured that way.
Among lettered venture rounds, Series A led on capital at $5.41B across 162 disclosed-size rounds out of 194 total. Series C recorded $5.18B across 28 disclosed-size rounds out of 35, Series D recorded $4.75B with all 21 rounds disclosing a size, and Series B recorded $4.33B across 72 disclosed-size rounds out of 95 total. Series E had two total and disclosed-size rounds; Series F had three total, two with disclosed sizes.
The early stage supplied volume rather than dollars. Seed and pre-seed together produced 353 disclosed-size rounds, 43.2% of the disclosed-size population, but $2.40B, or 4.5% of capital. Across all eligible records there were 480 seed and pre-seed rounds. Median disclosed pre-seed was $1.37M and median disclosed seed was $3.73M.
Median disclosed round sizes moved in different directions by stage against June:
Series A: $14.78M, down from $18.50M; 194 total rounds with 162 disclosed, versus 241 total with 201 disclosed
Series B: $29.52M, down from $35.00M; 95 total rounds in both months, with 72 disclosed in July versus 79 in June
Series C: $82.30M, up from $59.70M; 35 total rounds with 28 disclosed, versus 50 total with 47 disclosed
Series D: $65.00M, down from $148.61M; 21 total rounds, all disclosed, versus 17 total with 16 disclosed
Series C is the one stage where fewer deals came with larger cheques. Everywhere else the median compressed, which suggests the widening at the top of the market is not yet feeding through to the rounds beneath it.
Geography View
North America took 64.2% of July capital at $34.27B across 289 rounds, up 47.7% from June. Asia took 19.8% at $10.58B across 252 rounds, down 61.4% from a June figure of $27.38B that was itself inflated by large rounds. Europe took 14.1% at $7.54B across 214 rounds, down 7.4%.
Both swings are driven by a handful of rounds rather than by deal flow. Asia’s round count fell 3.8% while its capital fell 61.4%, and North America’s capital rose 47.7% even as its round count fell 41.9%.
U.S. companies raised $33.96B across 272 rounds, 63.6% of global capital. California took 45.9% of the U.S. total at $15.59B across 107 rounds. Washington state is second at $10.25B across just 9 rounds, which is Blue Origin’s Kent round and almost nothing else. Texas follows at $2.21B, then Washington D.C. at $1.36B, New York state at $1.29B and Massachusetts at $1.02B.
The state view is a rollup from company city, since the source records city and country but not state. Cities whose state cannot be resolved from the name alone are grouped separately in assets/us-state-breakdown.csv and account for $173.61M, or 0.5% of U.S. capital. The rollup reconciles exactly to the country-level U.S. total.
Kent, Washington leads every city in the world on capital with one round. Palo Alto recorded $6.39B across 9 rounds, Beijing $3.18B across 6 and Munich $2.35B across 8, each concentrated in a small number of large deals. San Francisco led on volume with 50 rounds worth $2.31B. London posted 45 rounds worth $936.46M, the second-highest round count of any city, at less than half San Francisco’s average round size. India produced 78 rounds worth $812.01M, more rounds than any country except the U.S., at an average near $10M.
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 $41.91B across 368 rounds, followed by Software at $29.91B across 373 rounds, Artificial Intelligence at $28.19B across 279 rounds and Data and Analytics at $28.04B across 286 rounds. Most large AI rounds carry all four tags.
AI-tagged rounds accounted for 52.8% of July capital.
Two sectors are worth separating out. Government and Military produced only 11 rounds but $13.40B of capital, the highest average of any group, on the back of Helsing and Quantum Systems. Health Care is the mirror image: 119 rounds, the seventh-highest count of any sector, but $3.82B of capital and an average round near $32M. Health Care companies are still getting funded at a steady rate, at a fraction of AI cheque sizes.
Lead investors
689 of 818 rounds, or 84.2%, had a named lead. Those leads were spread across 772 distinct firms, 686 of which led exactly one round. Only 86 firms led two or more.
Khosla Ventures and Insight Partners each led 8 rounds. Accel led 6. Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Inflection Point Ventures each led 5. The dollar figures behind those counts diverge sharply: Index Ventures led $2.19B of capital across its 5 rounds while Inflection Point Ventures led $2.35M across its 5. Same round count, three orders of magnitude apart.
Repeat investors
409 investors participated in two or more rounds during the month, out of 2,893 distinct names, so about 14% of participating investors were repeat buyers.
Y Combinator appeared in 28 rounds, more than double the next most active. Insight Partners appeared in 12, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Accel and Alumni Ventures in 11 each. The round value behind those counts varies enormously: Y Combinator’s 28 rounds carried $687.23M of total round value, while Lightspeed’s 11 rounds carried $5.33B. A seed programme and a multi-stage fund can both rank among the month’s busiest investors and be doing entirely different things with the money.
Where the experienced money went
Investor scores in this dataset are sparse and concentrated in priced venture rounds, so the useful measure is not an average score but how often a highly ranked investor appears in a round at all. Taking the 100 highest-scoring investors active in the data, their presence rises with stage:
Pre-seed: 1.3% of rounds
Seed: 12.6% of rounds
Series A: 24.1% of rounds
Series B: 26.4% of rounds
Series C: 32.1% of rounds
Series D: 38.1% of rounds
Roughly one Series C round in three included a top-100 investor in July, against one pre-seed round in seventy-five. Series Unknown, SAFE, corporate and undisclosed rounds carried no scored investor participation at all, which reflects how those instruments are recorded rather than who is behind them.
SignalRank Qualifiers Snapshot
Three companies met the SignalRank qualification standard on a Series B raised in July, down from seven in June. Together they raised $260M, with a median round of $95M, across two countries. July in prior years saw similarly smaller qualifiers.
Glow raised $100M in Palo Alto at the 99.6th percentile of the scored Series B cohort and Senra Systems raised $65M in Redondo Beach at the 100th. Dwelly raised $95M in London at the 98.1st.
Three qualifiers in a month is a small number, and it sits alongside 95 Series B rounds overall, 72 of which disclosed a size. The qualification standard is deliberately narrow, and a month with fewer qualifiers than usual says more about the composition of the Series B cohort than about the size of the market.
What This Means For
VCs
The market you are competing in depends on which market you are in. If you write $1B cheques, July was the strongest month of the year so far. If you write $10M to $50M cheques, July looked like February and April, and the market on that basis has moved sideways for six months. Median Series A fell to $14.78M and median Series B fell to $29.52M while Series C medians rose, so pricing pressure is currently sitting below the growth rounds rather than in them.
Lead activity is unusually dispersed. 772 different firms led at least one round and only 86 led more than one. There is no small group setting terms across the market right now.
Founders
Fewer companies raised in July, but the ones that did raised more: median round size went from $5.0M to $9.0M while deal count fell 26.2%. That combination usually means investors are being more selective per deal rather than deploying less overall.
Stage matters for what you should expect. At Series A and B, medians came down against June, so anchoring on spring comparables is likely to be optimistic. At Series C, medians rose while the number of rounds fell by 40%, so the bar is higher and the outcome for companies that clear it is better.
If you are outside the U.S., the volume is still there. London ran 45 rounds, second only to San Francisco worldwide, and India ran 78 rounds, more than any country except the U.S. Average round sizes in both are far below U.S. levels, so volume and cheque size are separate questions.
LPs
The 54.5% of July capital that went into eleven rounds is not accessible to most funds, and it is what drives the headline growth figure. When you read that venture funding is up 71.3% year over year, the relevant follow-up is what the market looked like without the largest rounds. On that basis, monthly capital has moved between $22.09B and $37.76B since February with no trend.
Concentration is worth watching as a risk measure rather than a momentum signal. 85.0% of July capital went to 100 rounds. A vintage built during months like this one will have very different exposure depending on whether a manager was in that top tier or among the 718 rounds that split the remaining 15.0%.
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 flag 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.
Some rounds in the source carry a sequence label such as after_secondary_market or after_debt_financing. That prefix describes where a transaction sits in a company’s funding history, not the economic type of the transaction itself. This report admits such a round only when the company’s current equity funding type is one of the venture types listed above, and then reports it at that current stage. Blue Origin’s July 8 round is the clearest case: the source records it as after_secondary_market while Crunchbase identifies the current transaction as Venture - Series Unknown, and it is reported here as Series Unknown. Reading the suffix literally would have dropped the largest round of the month. Rounds admitted this way account for 101 rounds and $14.39B, or 26.9% of July capital, and the full breakdown of what was admitted and what was excluded is in assets/venture-scope-reconciliation.csv.
Transactions whose current type is debt financing, a grant, non-equity assistance, a secondary market sale, private equity or a post-IPO financing remain outside this population. In July those excluded categories totalled $162.21B across 1,103 transactions, led by $51.28B of post-IPO debt, $49.03B of debt financing, $16.45B of private equity and $15.95B of secondary market transactions.
Sector figures unnest a multi-value sector tag, so a company tagged as both AI and Software counts in both buckets. Sector capital cannot be summed across sectors.
U.S. state figures are derived from company city, because the source records city and country but not state. Cities whose state is ambiguous from the name alone are reported in a separate bucket worth $173.61M. The state rollup reconciles exactly to the country-level U.S. total.
Investor scores are a relative ranking, not a 0-100 percentile, and most investor rows carry no score. Stage comparisons therefore use round-level presence of top-ranked investors rather than average scores.
Long-form country names from the source are shortened for display, so United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland appears as United Kingdom. Capital and round values are unchanged.
July 2026 was queried on August 6, 2026. Funding announcements continue to be recorded for several weeks after month end, with the longest lag at the earliest stages. July figures will revise upward and should be treated as a floor. June figures have had five additional weeks of accrual, so month-over-month comparisons overstate the decline.