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Venture capital deployed · 2026 YTD
Sector market cap
Largest raise · trailing 12mo
Catalysts ahead · next 12mo
Companies tracked
Nothing on the calendar yet.
Mega-rounds have taken over. Castelion closed a $1.0B Series C at $13.0B in August 2026, Hadrian a $1.4B Series D at $8.0B, and Quantum Systems a $1.2B Series D at $8.0B. Seed and Series A rounds stayed small, typically $12M to $70M, and the median disclosed round has climbed well past 2023 levels.
Capital is concentrating in late stages. Series C and D rounds dominate 2026, with Mach Industries' $600M Series D, Saronic's $1.8B Series D, and Shield AI's $1.5B Series G. Early-stage deals, including Firestorm Labs' $13M seed and Castelion's $14M seed, now sit far below the late-stage tickets that define the market.
Advent International, Blackstone, and Khosla Ventures each show up repeatedly in recent large rounds. Lockheed Martin led Fortem's $50M Series B in October 2026, a strategic entry. Founders Fund, which backed Anduril from 2018, has been quieter since its 2025 lead. Several 2021 to 2023 Series A and B leads, including Snowpoint and Bedrock, have not led rounds since 2025.
The Pentagon’s counter-drone gold rush is masking a deeper vulnerability: drone swarms are outpacing kill chains.
The defense sector’s next bottleneck isn’t technology—it’s production speed at scale.
The $100B Anduril bet reveals a defense-sector tension: software margins vs. hardware scalability.
The Pentagon’s hypersonic push is trading speed for scalability—and the winners may not be who you think.
As of 2026-08-01