Key Highlights of the Day: Major Events in the Venture Market
- Cognition AI, the developer of the AI agent for programming Devin, closed a round of approximately $1 billion at a valuation of around $47 billion — investor interest in the deal approached $10 billion.
- Crusoe, an operator of AI infrastructure and data centers, raised over $3 billion at a post-money valuation of approximately $30 billion from Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, and Mubadala Capital.
- Mega funds with assets exceeding $1 billion control 72% of the total value of venture deals in 2026 compared to 25% a year earlier.
- Over 70% of global venture capital in the second quarter was directed towards AI companies — a historic maximum concentration.
Cognition AI: Valuation of $47 Billion and the New Economy of AI Agents
The central deal of the week is Cognition AI's funding round. The startup behind the autonomous AI programmer Devin is raising around $1 billion, bringing its valuation to approximately $47 billion. Notably, investor demand to participate in the round nearly tenfold exceeded the target amount: the company received bids for almost $10 billion.
For venture funds, this deal indicates a shift of capital from foundational language models to applied AI agents with measurable revenue. Cognition demonstrates one of the fastest ARR growth rates in the industry's history, and investors are willing to pay a premium for confirmed monetization that is not available to companies with "conceptual" products. Rounds of this scale in the AI coding segment establish a new pricing benchmark for the entire category of development tools.
AI Infrastructure: Crusoe, Gimlet Labs, and the Battle for Computing Power
The infrastructure segment remains the second magnet for capital after applied AI. Key deals from recent days include:
- Crusoe completed financing of over $3 billion at a valuation of around $30 billion. The funds will be used for building data centers and expanding cloud capacities for AI workloads.
- Gimlet Labs raised $300 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $3 billion. New investors include Arm Holdings and Microsoft’s venture arm M12. The company is developing software to distribute AI workloads across different types of processors — a critical technology amid the fragmentation of computing infrastructure.
- HiddenLayer, specializing in the security of agent and generative AI applications, closed a $100 million Series B round — the AI security segment is becoming a mandatory line item in the theses of funds.
The logic for investors is clear: as the cost of training and inference for models increases, companies that reduce computation costs or enhance efficiency gain structural advantages and predictable corporate demand.
Mega Funds Reshape the Industry: 72% of the Market is Controlled by Giants
The structural shift of 2026 is the total dominance of mega funds. According to PitchBook data, funds with assets over $1 billion accounted for 72% of the total value of venture deals in the first half of the year, whereas a year ago, the figure was only 25%. Mega funds raised $50 billion in new capital in six months compared to $8 billion during the same period last year, with 73% of all new LP commitments concentrated in just five management firms.
Among the largest closures are: Thrive Capital with its Thrive X fund of $10 billion, Sequoia Capital with a late-stage AI fund of $7 billion, and Andreessen Horowitz with a growth fund of $6.75 billion — with a16z reportedly forming an AI mega fund of up to $20 billion. In Europe, the European Commission selected EQT to manage the Scaleup Europe fund worth €5 billion, half of which is already contracted with institutional investors, including Novo Holdings, Allianz, and APG.
Record Half-Year: $510 Billion and the Phenomenon of Two Companies
Crunchbase statistics indicate a historical anomaly: OpenAI and Anthropic together raised $217 billion — 43% of all global venture funding in the first half of 2026. OpenAI's $122 billion round in the first quarter became the largest private deal in history, while Anthropic, after raising $65 billion in the second quarter, topped the list of the most valuable private companies in the world. In the second quarter, 16 companies closed rounds exceeding $1 billion totaling $108.6 billion — more than half of the quarter's investment volume.
North America maintains its leadership: investments in startups in the US and Canada reached $392 billion for the half-year. Notably, there is a renaissance for early-stage investments — early capital exceeded $31 billion in the quarter, nearly double last year’s level, largely due to a $12 billion round for Prometheus, a physical AI startup involving Jeff Bezos.
Beyond AI: Where Else Venture Capital is Working
Despite the dominance of the AI agenda, capital is also finding applications in adjacent verticals:
- Defense Technologies: $12.3 billion in investments for the half-year — almost double last year's result; Anduril Industries closed a Series H at $5 billion.
- Healthcare: AusperBio Therapeutics raised $120 million in Series C, Elucid raised $55 million in Series D, and Scan.com raised $90 million for medical imaging development.
- Fintech: Ghanaian startup Moment raised $22 million in Series A from Speedinvest and QED Investors to build a payment infrastructure for African markets.
- Consumer Sector: Coffee chain Blank Street raised $105 million for expansion, while travel platform WeRoad raised $58 million.
Europe and Early Stages: Selectivity Over Scarcity
The European market is demonstrating targeted activity. Munich-based Zeit AI, founded by alumni of Palantir, raised €5 million in seed funding with participation from Y Combinator and Sequoia's scout fund — the company is building an autonomous data engineering agent that integrates with over 600 corporate systems. Brussels-based Backbone closed a pre-seed round of €4 million in the food industry compliance segment. Notably, strategic investors and industry players are increasingly participating in early syndicates: corporations are more frequently entering at the seed stage to secure access to technologies before growth rounds.
What This Means for Investors: Three Takeaways
- The barbell structure of the market is solidified. Capital is distributed between mega rounds of leaders and selective early deals, while the middle — Series B and C for companies without outstanding metrics — faces maximum pressure. Medium-sized funds require clear specialization to compete for quality deal flow.
- Due diligence is tightening across the funnel. Investors require confirmed revenue, a clean intellectual property structure, and clear unit economics even at the seed stage. The premium for “AI narrative” without commercial evidence is rapidly disappearing.
- Infrastructure and vertical AI are the main theses for the second half of the year. Computational efficiency, AI security, robotics, and industry-specific agents with measurable business effects remain the most competitive segments for new allocations.
Forecast: An Autumn of High Stakes
September traditionally opens the business season, and 2026 will be no exception: the market expects new mega rounds in the frontier AI segment, an activation of the IPO window after a strong second quarter, and continued consolidation in applied AI verticals through M&A and strategic acquisitions. For venture funds, the key question of the autumn is not capital availability but the discipline of its deployment: in a market where two issuers absorb almost half of global investments, selection quality determines portfolio returns more than ever in the past decade.
