OpenAI and Anthropic Take 43% of H1 2026 Venture Funding

Half a year, half a trillion. Crunchbase's latest half-year report, written by Gené Teare, says global venture funding reached a record $510 billion in the first six months of 2026, already ahead of the $440 billion invested across all of 2025. Q2 alone was $205 billion. On its own that would be the story. What makes it the story is where the money actually went.

OpenAI and Anthropic together took $217 billion in H1, which Crunchbase pegs at 43% of all startup funding. Anthropic's $65 billion Q2 round was enough, once SpaceX exited to the public markets, to make it the most valuable private company on the Crunchbase Unicorn Board. Sixteen companies raised billion-dollar rounds in Q2 for a combined $108.6 billion, and seven of those were frontier labs. The rest of the megaround cohort was, per the report, clustered in defense, AI infrastructure, robotics and healthcare.

The other half of the story is exits, which had been the missing half of the venture cycle for a while. SpaceX went public at a $1.77 trillion valuation and raised $75 billion in the offering, then confirmed a $60 billion deal for Anysphere, the maker of the AI coding tool Cursor. Twenty-four companies were acquired at prices at or above $1 billion in Q2, totaling $113 billion, which the report calls the highest quarter on record. Thirty-two companies went public above $1 billion. Liquidity is back, at least for the top.

The honest caveat is that a headline number like $510 billion flatters the market. Strip out OpenAI and Anthropic and you are describing a much thinner picture for everyone else, and the reporting does not tell you what fraction of the rest of the market saw flat or down rounds, or how much of Anthropic's $65 billion is committed versus marked. A SpaceX-buys-Cursor style deal at $60 billion also resets pricing expectations for AI dev tooling in ways that could squeeze earlier-stage founders in that lane.

For anyone who is not building a frontier lab, the useful read is that capital is still available if you can plausibly claim adjacency to compute, defense, robotics or clinical AI, and that the exit window has reopened for the first time in a while. The rest is a bet on two companies.