Venture capital deployed · 2026 YTD
Sector market cap
Largest raise · trailing 12mo
Catalysts ahead · next 12mo
Companies tracked
Nothing on the calendar yet.
Recent mega-rounds ($500M–$1.1B) dominate 2025–2026, led by Cerebras Series H ($1.0B), Groq Series E ($750M), Etched Series C ($700M), and Positron AI Series C ($875M). Median round sizes have climbed sharply for growth-stage players, while seed and Series A remain under $100M, creating a bimodal distribution favoring late-stage over early-stage capital deployment.
Capital is overwhelmingly late-stage heavy. Series C–H rounds and IPOs/acquisitions comprise 60%+ of all capital deployed since 2024. Early-stage (seed through Series B) has contracted as a proportion. Three IPOs in 2026 (Cerebras, Astera Labs, Alphawave Semi acquired at $2.4B; Intel $20B post-IPO raise) signal late-stage maturation dominates market momentum.
Tiger Global, Fidelity, Samsung, and SoftBank led repeated high-value rounds through 2024–2025. Jane Street and Stripes emerged as new mega-round leads in 2026 (Etched $700M, MatX $500M). Traditional VCs (Spark, Coatue, Sequoia) quiet since 2022. Strategic investors (Arm, Samsung Ventures, Temasek, Korea Development Bank) intensified participation in 2024–2026, signaling industry consolidation over venture-only funding.
The semiconductor foundry wars are being decided by who can turn AI-driven memory shortages into a competitive weapon.
China’s lithography ambitions are rewiring semiconductor supply chains faster than the market appreciates.
The semiconductor foundry race is no longer just about capacity—it’s about who controls the AI stack’s most critical choke points.
High-NA EUV’s early success masks a looming economic reckoning for semiconductor lithography.
As of 2026-08-01
Shut down in June 2025 after AMD hired its engineering team in an acqui-hire (reported under $100M); Untether's speedAI accelerators and imAIgine SDK were discontinued and the company wound down. It pivoted to generative-AI hardware too late to find a market against Nvidia.
Wound down its RISC-V AI data-center silicon business in mid-2025, cutting roughly 90% of its Mountain View staff and closing its European subsidiaries while seeking a buyer or IP licensee. Management cited an inability to match rivals' compensation and the difficulty of competing with Nvidia in generative-AI silicon.
