What are the current funding trends in agentic AI?

All funding deals in the agentic AI market over the last years

Below is the table listing all the deals. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our report covering the Agentic AI Market.

Is Agentic AI funding really booming right now?

Agentic AI funding is growing very fast right now, and the boom still looks real once we get past the biggest headline rounds.

We counted 258 financings in the current YTD period, versus 198 over the same dates in 2025 and 85 in 2024. The number of funded companies rose almost exactly in line with deals, from 190 to 247 year over year. At the same time, the median round jumped from $7 million to $11 million.

The dollar increase is much more dramatic. Recorded capital reached $9.68 billion, up from $3.48 billion over the comparable 2025 period. That 178% jump is far larger than the 30% increase in deals, so companies are clearly raising bigger checks as well.

And the growth survives a tougher test. Remove every round above $50 million and we still get $3.06 billion of funding, about 47% more than a year earlier. As of now, Agentic AI has both more funded companies and more money going into a typical financing.

Market measure	2026 YTD	2025 YTD	2024 YTD	2026 vs 2025
Deals	258	198	85	+30.3%
Unique companies	247	190	80	+30.0%
Recorded capital	$9.68B	$3.48B	$1.39B	+178%
Capital excluding >$50M	$3.06B	$2.08B	$705.8M	+46.9%
Capital excluding >$100M	$4.19B	$2.37B	$758.8M	+76.5%
Median round	$11.0M	$7.0M	$6.2M	+57.1%
Average round	$37.6M	$17.7M	$16.4M	+113%
Unique companies with >1 round	11	8	5	+37.5%

Is one giant Agentic AI round doing all the work?

No single Agentic AI deal explains the 2026 surge, although the biggest rounds now account for a huge share of the money.

The largest financing we recorded is Cognition's $2 billion round. On its own, that represents about 21% of current YTD capital. The top five deals together account for 40.6%.

Concentration gets even clearer when we look at the $100 million-plus layer. Those rounds absorb 58.8% of all capital. But the number of large financings has also changed dramatically.

There are now 31 rounds above $50 million, up from eight during the equivalent 2025 period. Fifteen financings are above $100 million using our strict >$100 million cut, versus four last year. The broader deal-size distribution, which includes transactions exactly at $100 million in the $100M+ bucket, contains 17 such rounds.

So the upper end has become crowded with large financings. Cognition makes the headline much bigger, but removing the whole >$50 million layer still leaves funding almost 47% higher year over year.

Outlier test	2026 YTD	2025 YTD	2024 YTD
Total recorded capital	$9.68B	$3.48B	$1.39B
Capital excluding >$50M	$3.06B	$2.08B	$705.8M
Capital excluding >$100M	$4.19B	$2.37B	$758.8M
Largest deal share	20.7%	11.5%	15.8%
Top three share	34.4%	28.3%	37.7%
Top five share	40.6%	34.2%	49.4%
Rounds above $50M	31	8	5
Rounds above $100M	15	4	4

Are small Agentic AI funding rounds disappearing?

Small Agentic AI rounds are getting squeezed even while the overall market grows.

We found 56 financings below $5 million this year, down from 73 during the same period in 2025. Their share of all transactions has fallen from 37.1% to 21.8%.

Every major bracket above $5 million moved in the other direction. Deals between $5 million and $20 million rose from 76 to 109. The $20 million to $50 million group increased from 40 to 56. Financings between $50 million and $100 million went from just four to 19.

The most dramatic move sits at the top. The broader $100 million-plus bucket went from four deals to 17 and now captures almost 59% of the market's dollars.

Growth is happening mainly from the middle of the financing market upward. The smallest round category is actually shrinking.

Deal size	2026 deals	2026 share	2025 deals	2025 share
<$5M	56	21.8%	73	37.1%
$5M–<$20M	109	42.4%	76	38.6%
$20M–<$50M	56	21.8%	40	20.3%
$50M–<$100M	19	7.4%	4	2.0%
$100M+	17	6.6%	4	2.0%
Deals at $5M or above	201	78.2%	124	62.9%
All classified deals	257	100%	197	100%

Are investors funding new Agentic AI startups or doubling down on companies they already know?

Agentic AI investors are putting much more of this year's extra money into companies that have already raised.

We identified 111 first financings in the current period, versus 103 last year. That is modest growth of roughly 8%.

Follow-on deals jumped from 93 to 146, or about 57%. Their share of financing activity moved from 47% to 56.6%.

The gap becomes enormous when we look at dollars. First financings account for about $1.03 billion, while follow-ons account for roughly $8.63 billion. Median follow-on size is $20 million, compared with $5.7 million for first financings.

Most of the extra transactions are coming from existing companies returning to investors, and those companies tend to raise much more money.

Our financing-status classification uses publicly traceable financing history rather than pretending every private-company round can be reconstructed perfectly. The exact counts therefore deserve some caution, but the gap between first rounds and follow-ons is large enough that the direction is hard to miss.

Financing pattern	2026 YTD	2025 YTD	2024 YTD
First financings	111	103	44
First-financing share	43.0%	52.0%	51.8%
Follow-ons	146	93	41
Follow-on share	56.6%	47.0%	48.2%
Capital in first financings	$1.03B	$677M	$617M
Capital in follow-ons	$8.63B	$2.79B	$777M
Median first financing	$5.7M	$4.5M	$5.0M
Median follow-on	$20M	$18M	$10M

Is Seed funding still at the center of Agentic AI?

Seed is still the biggest stage in Agentic AI by deal count, but its grip on the market has weakened sharply this year.

Seed accounts for 146 transactions, or 56.6% of current deals. A year ago it represented 66.7%. Losing roughly ten percentage points in a single comparable period is a meaningful change.

Series A has absorbed most of that shift. Its share climbed from 21.2% to 29.5%, with 76 Series A rounds this year. The median Series A financing is $23 million, almost unchanged from $22.25 million last year, so the story here is mainly more Series A deals rather than runaway inflation in the typical check.

Higher stages are taking more dollars as well. Series B has a $52.5 million median, Series C sits at $120 million, and five Series D+ transactions alone account for 38.3% of all recorded capital.

Seed startups can clearly still raise money. What has changed is the amount of the market that now sits one or several steps beyond Seed.

Why are Agentic AI companies raising such huge rounds now?

The biggest Agentic AI rounds increasingly belong to companies that can show real enterprise usage and, in a few cases, hundreds of millions of dollars in annualized revenue.

Cognition is the standout example. When the company raised more than $1 billion earlier this year, it reported a $492 million annualized revenue run rate and said enterprise use of Devin had been growing 50% month over month for six months. A few months later, Cognition raised another $2 billion and said that run rate had reached about $900 million.

Sierra's numbers point in the same direction. When the company announced a $950 million raise, it said its agents were serving more than 40% of the Fortune 50 and powering billions of customer interactions. Sierra had previously said annual recurring revenue had crossed $150 million.

Factory gives us another useful example below the billion-dollar tier. The coding-agent company recently raised $200 million at a $5 billion valuation. Factory says hundreds of thousands of developers use its software and names Nvidia, Adobe, T-Mobile, Palo Alto Networks, RBC and Blackstone among companies using its platform.

Enterprise customers are also reporting more concrete use of agents. In TechCrunch's reporting around Sierra's financing, Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga said around 10% of code across roughly 8,000 engineers and technical workers was already being generated autonomously. He also described an agent-driven hotel integration that took six months instead of roughly a year.

Plenty of Agentic AI startups still have limited revenue. But at the top end, investors now have companies with enough usage, revenue and customer deployment to support a financing scale that was much harder to justify during the first agent wave.

Which Agentic AI categories are investors paying more attention to now?

Agent development platforms and execution infrastructure are gaining breadth, while vertical AI agents still attract by far the most money.

Vertical AI Agents account for 157 deals, so they remain the largest part of the market. Yet their deal share fell from 68.2% last year to 60.9% now.

Agent Execution Infrastructure moved from 22 to 37 deals, lifting its share by more than three percentage points. Agent Development Platforms rose from 20 to 30 deals and increased their capital share from 6.4% to 10%.

Agentic AI Applications grew from 15 to 23 deals but lost a large amount of capital share. Agent Memory Systems remain small, although eight financings now make memory visible enough to treat as a developing category rather than an isolated niche.

Investor attention is spreading across the stack even as most dollars remain concentrated in vertical-agent leaders.

Agentic AI category	2026 deals	Deal share	Change vs 2025	Capital share
Vertical AI Agents	157	60.9%	-7.3 pp	73.9%
Agent Execution Infrastructure	37	14.3%	+3.2 pp	7.8%
Agent Development Platforms	30	11.6%	+1.5 pp	10.0%
Agentic AI Applications	23	8.9%	+1.3 pp	7.3%
Agent Memory Systems	8	3.1%	+2.1 pp	0.8%
Human Approval Agents	3	1.2%	-0.9 pp	0.1%
Infrastructure + platforms	67	26.0%	+4.7 pp combined	17.8%
All Agentic AI deals	258	100%	—	100%

Are vertical AI agents still where most of the money goes?

Vertical AI agents are still taking most Agentic AI funding, and the checks going into the category have become much larger.

Vertical agents receive 73.9% of current capital, up from 70.7% last year and 56.4% two years ago. At the same time, their share of deals has fallen.

We are seeing heavier funding of companies within the category rather than vertical agents simply taking over a larger share of startup formation.

Median round size supports that reading. It increased from $7 million to $13 million in one year.

The current crop of large vertical-agent companies also spans very different jobs. Cognition and Factory are tackling software development, Sierra is focused on customer experience, and other funded companies work in legal, security, healthcare and industry-specific workflows.

Vertical agents remain the center of gravity for Agentic AI capital today. The category is increasingly being shaped by how much investors are willing to put behind its strongest companies.

Is Agentic AI infrastructure becoming a bigger business?

Agentic AI infrastructure is attracting more startups and more investor attention as companies discover how much plumbing autonomous software actually needs.

Execution infrastructure grew from 22 to 37 deals year over year. Development platforms rose from 20 to 30. Together, those two groups now account for 67 financings, roughly a quarter of the market.

The underlying problems are becoming more concrete. Agents need execution environments, permissions, monitoring, context, memory, security and ways to interact safely with company systems.

We can see investors financing those layers directly. General Catalyst described Modal as infrastructure for workloads including sandboxes that run agent-generated code. Its investment in Engram focused specifically on persistent AI memory. Sequoia has backed Edra around enterprise context for agents. AIR recently emerged with $50 million to secure the growing ecosystem of agent skills, plug-ins and MCP servers.

These are different products, but they come from the same practical issue: once companies let agents perform work rather than just answer questions, reliability around the agent becomes a business of its own.

Are general Agentic AI applications losing momentum?

General Agentic AI applications are still getting funded, but they are attracting a smaller slice of the market's money.

The number of deals rose from 15 to 23. On deal activity alone, the category looks healthy.

Capital moved very differently. Applications fell from 15.8% of market funding to 7.3%, while their median round declined from $10 million to $8.25 million.

We therefore have more application financings alongside lower relative spending per category. Investors are still willing to back new products, but the biggest checks are flowing elsewhere, especially to vertical agents and mature winners.

A larger base of small application companies could eventually produce new leaders, or the category could remain busy at the startup level while capital keeps concentrating elsewhere.

For now, the second description fits the evidence better.

Is North America pulling away in Agentic AI funding?

North America is pulling away in Agentic AI dollars because its companies are raising much bigger rounds, not because the region suddenly has a much larger share of startups.

North America represents 60.5% of current deals, only slightly below its 2025 share. Yet it captures 79.8% of capital.

Median financing rose from $10 million to $17 million. Cognition, Sierra and Factory all reinforce what that looks like at the upper end.

Europe has also seen larger rounds, with its median moving from roughly $4.1 million to $6 million. Its deal share is 25.6% and its capital share 15.8%.

APAC has gone the other way. Deals increased from 12 to 21, lifting the region's share of activity, while its capital share fell from 4.7% to 1.9%. The current APAC median is about $7.15 million.

The geographic split is increasingly about financing depth. APAC is producing more funded companies, Europe is seeing some check-size improvement, and North America continues to capture most of the very large rounds.

Are the same VC firms dominating Agentic AI funding?

Several major VC firms are showing up far more often in Agentic AI rounds, but the overall lead-investor base has also become broader.

We identified roughly 220 distinct named lead or co-lead investors in the current period, compared with about 184 last year and 92 two years ago. Investor participation has expanded alongside the number of funded companies.

Within that larger group, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz each appear as lead or co-lead on eight current-period deals. General Catalyst appears on six, while GV and Index Ventures appear on four each.

Recent behavior fits the pattern. Andreessen Horowitz co-led Cognition's $2 billion financing. Sequoia participated in Factory's $200 million round and has publicly described 2026 as the year when agents became a central AI investment theme. General Catalyst has been investing across several parts of the stack, including AI memory and execution infrastructure.

Those lead counts should be read as frequency rather than money committed; public disclosures rarely tell us each investor's exact check.

Company-level funding concentration is rising while the pool of disclosed lead investors is still expanding. More firms are entering the market, even as a smaller group of Agentic AI companies absorbs a growing share of the capital.

Are corporate investors becoming a bigger force in Agentic AI?

We still cannot make a strong market-wide claim that corporate investors are becoming more important in Agentic AI.

There are plenty of real strategic investors in individual financings, and corporate participation makes sense in a market touching cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, security and industry-specific workflows.

The problem is measurement. Some public financing announcements name only selected investors, while other records simply say that additional participants were undisclosed. Treating every unclear entry as strategic participation would inflate the numbers.

We therefore preserve this as an open question rather than forcing a trend out of incomplete disclosure.

That caution is specific to strategic-investor participation. The evidence behind larger rounds, more follow-ons, stage migration and category rotation is much stronger.

Has Agentic AI funding already beaten all of 2025?

Agentic AI has already raised substantially more money in the current 2026 period than we recorded during the entire 2025 calendar year.

Full-year 2025 produced 306 deals and about $6.10 billion of recorded capital. The current YTD period has 258 deals and $9.68 billion.

In other words, deal count has reached about 84% of last year's full-year level while capital has already reached roughly 159%.

The comparison with 2024 is even more dramatic. Current YTD deal activity is almost double the full 2024 count, while capital is more than four times the full-year 2024 amount.

We would not extrapolate that pace mechanically into a year-end forecast. Venture rounds are lumpy, and a handful of very large transactions can make one part of the year unusually heavy.

Still, the existing total is enough to show how much financing intensity has changed. Agentic AI does not need another quarter of megadeals to establish that 2026 is operating at a very different capital scale from the previous two years.

Is Agentic AI becoming a more mature funding market?

Agentic AI is becoming a more mature funding market as the startup cohort moves from Seed into larger follow-on rounds.

The stage mix gives us the strongest evidence. Seed lost about ten percentage points of deal share, Series A gained eight, later-stage deals became more common, and follow-ons moved above half of all financings.

Round sizes tell the same story from another angle. The number of sub-$5 million financings fell, while the $5 million to $20 million, $20 million to $50 million and larger categories all grew.

Company ages broadly fit this pattern as well. Among companies for which we could establish a founding year, the median moves from around one year in the 2024 comparable period to 1.5 years in 2025 and two years currently.

We put less weight on that last comparison because founding-year coverage is weaker this year: only 62% of current records have a usable founding year, compared with 86.9% last year and 96.5% two years ago.

The financing behavior is much harder to dismiss. More of today's capital is going into companies that have already survived an earlier funding round and are coming back for considerably larger checks.

What is actually changing in Agentic AI funding?

Agentic AI funding is genuinely stronger in 2026. We have more deals, more funded companies, a much higher median round and almost 47% growth even after removing every financing above $50 million. The boom would be smaller without the megadeals, but it would still be a boom.

The bigger change is where the extra money goes. Follow-on financings rose far faster than first financings and now absorb close to $8.6 billion. Investors are putting considerably more capital behind companies that have already made it through an earlier funding cycle.

Round size has also moved up across almost the entire market. The sub-$5 million category shrank while every bracket above $5 million expanded. At the extreme end, $100 million-plus deals now take close to 59% of all capital.

Vertical AI agents remain the main destination for money, although infrastructure and development platforms are producing some of the strongest growth in deal activity. Today's market is expanding in two directions at once: deeper checks into established vertical-agent companies and a broader set of startups building the infrastructure around agents.

The stage mix is moving forward too. Seed remains large, but Series A has gained significant share and a tiny number of Series D+ rounds now command a remarkable amount of capital. The market looks increasingly like a startup cohort growing up rather than a fresh Seed wave replacing the old one.

If there is one figure we would treat carefully, it is the apparent trend in strategic-investor participation because public disclosure is too inconsistent for a clean comparison. Company-age estimates also have weaker coverage this year. Neither issue changes the broader picture.

Right now, the defining feature of Agentic AI funding is the emergence of a heavily funded winner layer on top of a market that is itself still expanding.