Series A Rounds Over $100M Hit a Record 114 in 2026

A Series A round used to mean a company had a product, some early revenue and a pitch for why it deserved its first institutional check. In 2026, it increasingly means a nine-figure wire transfer to a team that formed months earlier. Crunchbase News counted at least 114 Series A rounds of $100 million or more closed globally in 2026, the highest annual total on record, worth roughly $33 billion combined. Twelve of those rounds cleared $500 million each.

More than 70% of that megaround money went to AI-focused startups, according to Crunchbase News, which tracks private financing globally. The pattern is not confined to Series A: AI startups pulled in $394 billion in the first half of 2026 alone, 77% of all global venture investment tracked by the firm. A round that would have counted as a growth-stage financing three years ago is now a company's introduction to institutional capital, the same jump The Terminal has tracked in later-stage rounds like Mistral's Series D and Harvey's $1.55 billion raise.

The math behind the count

Divide $33 billion by 114 rounds and the average megaround Series A comes to roughly $289 million, a figure no single deal needs to match for the average to hold, since a handful of billion-dollar rounds pull it upward. In the U.S. specifically, Crunchbase counted about 62 rounds of $100 million or more worth a combined $15 billion, which it said puts the country on track for a record year; that same math puts the U.S. average closer to $242 million, lower than the global figure.

The gap points outside the U.S.: the remaining 52 rounds accounted for roughly $18 billion, an average of about $346 million each, well above the U.S. figure. Crunchbase's own count does not break down which countries drove that gap, but XPeng Robotics, funded largely by Chinese investors, is the kind of deal that would pull the non-U.S. average higher on its own.

1. River AI (Aug. 11)1100 $M
2. XPeng Robotics (Aug. 24)900 $M

Source: TechCrunch and PR Newswire, accessed Sept. 25, 2026

Crunchbase's own analysis line put it bluntly: exit multiples, the firm said, "historically, and to an even greater extent recently, reward those who are anything but modest in their ambitions." That is a description of investor incentive, not of company quality, and the two biggest examples from the past two months show how differently the money can be deployed.

What $2 billion actually bought

River AI raised $1.1 billion in a combined seed and Series A round on Aug. 11, led by General Catalyst and Amp PBC, with Nvidia, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator and Temasek also participating, according to TechCrunch's report on the round. The company, founded by former xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, was two months old at the time. TechCrunch's reporting did not include a valuation figure; River AI has not disclosed one.

River AI builds infrastructure for training and running personalized AI agents, including an API for reinforcement-learning fine-tuning on open models. The company said in its own funding post that an enterprise can complete a complex reinforcement-learning run in 15 to 20 minutes without a dedicated infrastructure team, at two to four times the cost of closed-source alternatives, a comparison River AI has not had independently verified.

XPeng's robotics unit raised a separate megaround on Aug. 24: more than $900 million at a post-money valuation above $6.3 billion, led by IDG Capital with Gaorong Ventures, Tencent and Alibaba also investing, according to the company's own release. Of that total, $600 million came from outside investors, $200 million from XPeng itself and $100 million from its own executives, an internal-heavy structure unusual for a round this size. The money funds mass production of XPeng's Iron humanoid robot, scheduled to enter series production by the end of 2026 for use inside XPeng's own stores before a wider commercial launch in 2027.

What the count leaves out

Crunchbase's tally measures announced rounds, not necessarily rounds that have fully closed; a company can disclose a lead investor and a headline number while later tranches remain conditional, a structure The Terminal has seen attached to other 2026 megarounds. The count also treats a $100 million Series A for a twelve-person team the same as one for a company with paying enterprise customers, which is precisely the distinction that used to define what a Series A was for.

Neither River AI nor XPeng Robotics has published a revenue figure alongside its round, which means neither company has offered the one number that would let an outsider check whether $289 million is a reasonable average price for a team this early or a bet that a handful of these rounds will justify the rest. Crunchbase's own data covers only the check size and the participants; it says nothing about what either company has shipped.

The next data point worth watching is not another single round but Crunchbase's own full-year tally, typically published in the first weeks of the following January, which will show whether the 114-round pace held through the fourth quarter or whether the market pulled back once a few of these AI bets started reporting real usage numbers instead of headcount.