What are the funding trends in semiconductors?

All funding deals in the semiconductor industry 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 Semiconductor Industry.

Semiconductor funding: what is actually changing in 2026?

Is semiconductor funding really booming right now?

Semiconductor funding is booming in dollars right now, but far fewer companies are sharing in that boom.

We counted 92 qualifying financings across 85 semiconductor companies in the current year-to-date period, for at least $13.45 billion of disclosed or conservatively measurable capital. That is almost four times the capital raised over the same stretch of 2025.

The strange part is that dealmaking moved the other way. The comparable 2025 period produced 111 deals across 108 companies. So while capital jumped 274%, deals fell 17% and the number of funded companies dropped 21%.

Round sizes explain most of that disconnect. The median priced round rose from $22.25 million last year to $40 million currently. The average shot from $45 million to $162 million because 2026 has produced an unusually thick layer of very large financings.

The comparison with 2024 is useful too. We found 77 deals and 73 funded companies over the equivalent period two years ago. Activity today is still comfortably above that level. What has changed most dramatically this year is how much money can now pile into a relatively small number of financings.

Funding measure	2026 YTD	2025 same period	2024 same period
Deals	92	111	77
Unique funded companies	85	108	73
Capital raised	≥$13.45B	≥$3.60B	≥$5.45B
Capital excluding >$50M rounds	$778M	$1.20B	$736M
Capital excluding >$100M rounds	$1.21B	$1.45B	$1.11B
Median priced round	$40.0M	$22.25M	$21.8M
Average priced round	$162.1M	$45.0M	$92.4M
Largest round	$1.70B	$750M	$1.496B

Would semiconductor funding still look strong without the giant rounds?

Semiconductor funding would actually be down versus last year if we removed the biggest rounds.

Below $50 million, we calculate only $778 million of capital this year, compared with about $1.20 billion over the same period in 2025. That is a 35% decline.

Even after raising the cutoff to $100 million, the result remains negative. Current capital below that level comes to roughly $1.21 billion versus $1.45 billion last year, down 17%.

That changes how the headline growth figure should be read. Ordinary venture financings have not suddenly become much easier or more plentiful. Most of the extra money sits in a new upper tier of $100 million, $300 million, $500 million and even billion-dollar rounds.

The unusual part is that this upper tier is no longer tiny. We counted 33 current financings above $100 million under our conservative treatment of round amounts, compared with just eight over the same stretch of 2025.

So today's funding surge survives the "one giant deal" test, but it fails the "broad boom" test.

Is one company making semiconductor funding look bigger than it really is?

No. Semiconductor funding is heavily driven by megadeals these days, but there are too many of them for one company to explain the market.

Rapidus has the largest current financing in our research at $1.7 billion, followed by another $943 million financing later in the year. Those amounts are huge, yet the largest deal represents only around 13% of total current capital.

Several other companies are operating in the same extraordinary financing bracket. Tenstorrent raised roughly $1.29 billion. Positron announced an $875 million Series C. Etched raised $700 million. Ayar Labs closed a $500 million Series E before adding further capital later in the year, while MatX also raised about $500 million.

As of now, 39 rounds in our dataset exceed $50 million, compared with 12 during the equivalent 2025 period. The top five deals account for about 41% of current capital, which is actually lower than the top-five concentration we calculated for both 2025 and 2024.

That looks contradictory at first, but it isn't. The market has become much more dependent on large rounds overall, while dependence on the five very largest rounds has fallen because so many other companies are also raising nine-figure amounts.

Large-round measure	2026 YTD	2025 same period	2024 same period
Rounds above $50M	39	12	16
Rounds above $100M	33	8	11
$100M+ share of priced rounds	41.0%	10.0%	18.6%
$100M+ share of disclosed capital	91.8%	59.7%	79.6%
Top-1 share of capital	12.6%	20.8%	27.4%
Top-3 share of capital	29.2%	34.4%	58.8%
Top-5 share of capital	40.9%	46.8%	66.6%

Why are semiconductor startups raising so much money now?

Today's biggest semiconductor startups need enormous amounts of money to turn AI chips, optical interconnects and advanced manufacturing projects into products that can ship at scale.

Positron shows how quickly those requirements can ramp. The company announced a $50 million-plus Series A in 2025, followed by a $230 million Series B early in 2026 and an $875 million Series C later in the year. Positron says the latest capital is intended to bring its next-generation inference silicon to market and scale its systems business.

Etched offers another good example. The company said in August that it had shipped its first rack to Jane Street and raised another $700 million to accelerate production. Its own description of what comes next includes factories, global supply chains and gigawatt-scale deployment. Those are very different costs from funding a chip-design team before commercialization.

Ayar Labs is scaling another bottleneck: optical connectivity inside AI infrastructure. It raised $500 million to accelerate volume production of co-packaged optics, then announced another $150 million as it expanded manufacturing readiness and high-volume production plans.

Xsight Labs raised more than $300 million after gaining traction for connectivity silicon used in AI and cloud networks. The company explicitly tied the round to growing demand across hyperscalers, service providers and equipment manufacturers.

The funding market is following physical scale. Once a semiconductor company gets past the early technical-risk phase, commercial deployment can require manufacturing capacity, packaging, networking, validation, inventory and customer infrastructure. Hundreds of millions of dollars can disappear very quickly into that transition.

Is AI really driving the semiconductor funding boom?

AI infrastructure is currently the clearest force behind the semiconductor funding boom, especially in compute and networking.

Logic Semiconductors account for 59 of the 92 current deals we researched and about $9.94 billion of capital. Their share of transactions rose from 44% last year to 64% today, while the median Logic round climbed from roughly $25 million to $135 million.

That pattern goes well beyond companies simply putting "AI" in a pitch deck. Positron is building inference silicon. Etched is scaling inference hardware. MatX is developing processors for AI training and inference. Ayar Labs is tackling the bandwidth and power constraints that appear when increasingly large AI systems need to connect chips together. Xsight Labs is selling high-speed connectivity silicon into AI and cloud networks.

Demand further down the infrastructure chain points in the same direction. NVIDIA announced $2 billion investments in both Lumentum and Coherent this year as part of agreements designed to expand optical capacity for next-generation AI infrastructure. Coherent subsequently reported record fiscal-year revenue and said AI data-center architectures were increasingly shifting toward optical connectivity.

AMD Ventures provides another useful window into what strategic investors are chasing today. Its current investment focus explicitly includes silicon technologies and high-performance interconnects, and AMD says it has invested more than $2 billion across AI.

We cannot attribute every large semiconductor round to AI, and Rapidus is an obvious example where national industrial policy plays a major role. Still, the category data and the companies receiving the biggest checks put AI compute and the infrastructure around it at the center of this financing cycle.

Is Logic Semiconductor taking over startup funding?

Logic Semiconductor has become the clear center of gravity in semiconductor startup funding.

Logic now represents almost two-thirds of the deals we found and roughly three-quarters of current capital. More importantly, it is gaining on both dimensions at once.

Its deal share increased by about 20 percentage points versus the comparable 2025 period. The category's median round also climbed to $135 million, roughly 5.4 times last year's level.

More Logic companies are raising, and the checks going into them are much larger.

Analog currently represents 15% of deals but only 2% of capital. Power accounts for almost 10% of transactions and less than 2% of funding. Sensors have dropped to four current deals. Memory is smaller again.

Foundry Services is the one category that rivals Logic on sheer capital intensity, although for a very different reason.

Semiconductor category	Deals	Deal share	Capital	Capital share	Median round	Deal-share change vs 2025
Logic	59	64.1%	$9.94B	73.9%	$135M	+20.0 pp
Analog	14	15.2%	$264M	2.0%	$22.9M	-5.5 pp
Power	9	9.8%	$234M	1.7%	$19.5M	-3.7 pp
Foundry Services	4	4.3%	$2.92B	21.7%	$598M	+3.4 pp
Sensor	4	4.3%	$36M	0.3%	$6.9M	-11.9 pp
Memory	2	2.2%	$60M	0.4%	$30.0M	-2.3 pp
Total	92	100%	≥$13.45B	100%	$40M market median	—

Is there really a foundry startup boom?

The apparent foundry funding boom is mostly a Rapidus story for now.

We calculate about $2.92 billion of current Foundry Services capital, up from less than $30 million over the comparable period last year. That gives the category more than one-fifth of semiconductor funding despite only four transactions.

Rapidus accounts for roughly $2.64 billion of that amount.

The Japanese company completed a 267.6 billion yen financing worth about $1.7 billion early in the year, including capital from the Japanese government and dozens of private-sector companies. It then received another 150 billion yen, around $943 million, through Japan's Information-Technology Promotion Agency.

Rapidus says the funding is meant to support its move from R&D toward mass production of 2nm logic semiconductors in 2027.

The jump is real, but it is narrow. It shows that semiconductor manufacturing has become important enough for governments and large corporations to commit venture-sized and infrastructure-sized sums to individual projects. It does not show a large new population of privately financed foundry startups suddenly appearing.

Are semiconductor investors moving away from early-stage startups?

Semiconductor investors have moved noticeably toward later-stage companies, but early-stage funding is still alive.

Seed and Series A together represent 39.1% of current transactions, down from 42.3% over the same stretch last year. Later-stage deals rose much more sharply, from 36.9% to 47.8%.

Series C is where the change becomes easy to see. We counted 13 current Series C rounds compared with eight last year, and the median current Series C financing reached roughly $245 million.

Growth Equity also expanded from four deals to eight. Those eight financings alone account for more than $3.2 billion of capital.

Series D+ is small by volume, with five transactions, but carries a $300 million median. Meanwhile, Seed rounds have a median of only $3.4 million.

The market still funds companies at the beginning of the journey. The much bigger change is how aggressively capital piles into businesses once investors believe those companies are ready to commercialize and scale.

Stage	Current deals	Deal share	2025 deal share	Current capital	Median round
Seed	16	17.4%	18.9%	$129M	$3.4M
Series A	20	21.7%	23.4%	$1.74B	$45M
Series B	18	19.6%	19.8%	$2.14B	$63.5M
Series C	13	14.1%	7.2%	$2.64B	$244.5M
Series D+	5	5.4%	6.3%	$2.34B	$300M
Growth Equity	8	8.7%	3.6%	$3.22B	$132M
Stage not established	12	13.0%	20.7%	$1.25B	$23.3M

Can a new semiconductor startup still get funded today?

Yes. New semiconductor startups are still entering the funding market, although their first checks are currently much smaller than the money flowing into established companies.

Our financing-history research identifies 17 first financings this year, equal to 18.5% of classified deals. The comparable share was only 13.6% last year.

So fewer total semiconductor deals have not translated into fewer first-time financings in proportional terms.

The size gap is huge, though. We calculate a $6.9 million median for first financings, down from $14 million last year. Follow-on rounds currently have a $90 million median, compared with $23.9 million previously.

First-financing capital totals around $180 million. Follow-ons account for roughly $13.27 billion.

Investors are still willing to fund new technical teams, but once a company has already raised, proved enough of its technology and found a believable route to commercial deployment, its access to capital can move into a completely different league.

We treat the first-financing classification as a researched funding-history indicator rather than a claim that every historical transaction for every company is publicly discoverable. The gap between initial and follow-on round sizes is large enough that this limitation does not change the basic picture.

Are giant semiconductor rounds only going to old companies?

No. Many of today's huge semiconductor rounds are going to surprisingly young companies.

The median company age at financing is currently four years among businesses for which we could establish a founding year. It was five years in the comparable 2025 period.

Even some later-stage recipients are younger than we might expect. Current Series C companies have a median age of around five years, compared with 7.5 years last year. Growth Equity recipients are around four years old at the median.

The category mix helps explain why. Logic companies currently have a median age of four years, while Power and Memory companies are around two. Analog businesses are much older at eight years.

Companies such as MatX, Etched and Positron illustrate how quickly funding can escalate when investors believe a young semiconductor company has a real shot at an AI infrastructure bottleneck.

These days, maturity in semiconductor funding is increasingly about technical and commercial milestones rather than simply years since incorporation.

Is semiconductor startup funding shifting from China to the US?

Yes. Semiconductor deal activity has swung sharply toward the United States this year while Chinese funding activity has dropped.

We counted 32 current U.S. deals, almost twice the 17 found over the same stretch of 2025. China moved from 63 deals last year to 17 currently.

At the regional level, North America's deal share rose from 17.1% to 38.0%. Asia-Pacific fell from 62.2% to 39.1%.

That is too large a shift to explain through one or two megarounds.

Japan looks very different. It has only three current deals in our research but about $2.65 billion of recorded capital because Rapidus is so large. Japan therefore has extraordinary capital intensity without broad startup activity.

Europe presents another useful contrast. We found exactly 20 European deals in both periods, but capital increased from roughly $381 million to $1.76 billion. European semiconductor companies are not raising more often; the rounds themselves have become much larger.

The current geographic shift therefore has several layers: more U.S. transactions, far fewer Chinese transactions, unusually concentrated Japanese capital and much larger European checks.

Region	2026 deal share	2025 deal share	2024 deal share	Change vs 2025	Current capital share
North America	38.0%	17.1%	19.5%	+20.9 pp	48.5%
Asia-Pacific	39.1%	62.2%	61.0%	-23.0 pp	36.2%
Europe	21.7%	18.0%	16.9%	+3.7 pp	13.0%
Middle East	1.1%	2.7%	2.6%	-1.6 pp	2.2%
United States	32 deals	17 deals	15 deals	+15 deals	—
China	17 deals	63 deals	35 deals	-46 deals	—
Europe	20 deals	20 deals	—	No change	$1.76B

Are corporate investors piling into semiconductor startups now?

Strategic investors are much more visible in semiconductor funding again, especially around AI logic and connectivity.

We found corporate or other strategic investors in 39 current financings, or 42.4% of all deals. Their share was only 29.7% over the same part of 2025.

Their checks have changed even more. The median strategic-backed financing rose from about $24 million last year to $145 million currently.

Logic accounts for 28 of those 39 strategic-backed deals. The participation is also spread across Series A, Series B and Series C rather than appearing only after companies become mature.

Recent corporate actions fit that pattern closely. NVIDIA's $2 billion investments in Lumentum and Coherent were paired with capacity and technology agreements around advanced optics for AI infrastructure. Ayar Labs says its strategic backers include AMD, Intel, MediaTek and NVIDIA. NVIDIA also joined iPronics' recent $125 million round for programmable optical networking.

We see the same theme from the investor side. AMD Ventures explicitly describes compute, memory, power management, packaging and interconnects as core parts of its current AI investment strategy.

Corporate capital is showing up where strategic supply-chain value is becoming obvious: compute silicon, optical links, advanced packaging and other pieces that determine how much AI infrastructure can actually be built.

Are the same semiconductor investors funding everything?

No. The semiconductor lead-investor pool remains broad, but repeat investors are showing up much more often this year.

We identified 82 unique disclosed lead or co-lead investors currently, very close to the 85 found during the same 2025 period.

What changed is repeat activity. Eight lead investors appear on more than one current deal, compared with only two last year.

Maverick Silicon appears five times in our research. Innovation Industries, Matter Venture Partners and Seligman Ventures appear three times each. Atreides Management, Jane Street, SemiAnalysis Capital and Valor Equity Partners each show up twice.

Jane Street is particularly interesting because its role extends beyond writing checks. Etched said Jane Street led its $700 million financing after testing the company's hardware, and Etched had already shipped its first rack to the firm. Jane Street also co-led MatX's roughly $500 million financing.

Investor disclosure is better this year too: we could identify a disclosed lead in about two-thirds of deals, up from 55% last year. That makes the rise in repeat participation harder to explain away as a data-availability quirk.

The market still has plenty of investor breadth. What seems to be increasing is conviction: a subset of investors is making repeated bets across semiconductor infrastructure rather than appearing once and moving on.

Which semiconductor categories are getting left behind?

Sensors have lost the most deal momentum, while Analog has suffered the biggest drop in capital relevance.

Sensor companies represent only 4.3% of current transactions, down almost 12 percentage points from last year. We found four current Sensor deals carrying only around $36 million in total capital.

Analog remains much more active, with 14 deals, but its deal share fell by 5.5 points and its capital share dropped by more than 18 points.

Power is still present with nine transactions, although those deals amount to only about $234 million. Memory currently has two financings worth roughly $60 million.

These categories do not look dead. They are simply being dwarfed by what has happened in Logic.

A $20 million or $30 million financing that would normally look substantial now sits beside repeated $300 million, $500 million and billion-dollar rounds in AI compute and semiconductor infrastructure. The center of gravity can move fast when that happens.

Has semiconductor funding already beaten the last two full years?

Current semiconductor funding has already exceeded the capital raised during both full-year 2025 and full-year 2024 in our research.

Capital raised so far equals roughly 168% of our full-year 2025 total and 119% of the 2024 figure.

Yet current deal count represents only around 60% of all deals recorded in 2025 and 74% of those recorded in 2024.

That comparison is more revealing than simply calling this a "record year." We are comparing a partial year with complete years, so we would not annualize the figure or assume that the current pace continues.

What we can say confidently is that the market has already absorbed more capital while completing far fewer transactions.

Whatever happens next, 2026 has already become an unusually capital-intensive semiconductor funding year.

So what is actually changing in semiconductor funding?

Semiconductor funding is becoming a two-speed market: ordinary financings remain competitive, while companies tied to AI compute, interconnects and manufacturing scale can now raise extraordinary amounts.

The biggest change is round size rather than startup participation. Fewer companies have raised than last year, yet the median financing has increased sharply and the number of nine-figure rounds has exploded.

The megadeal effect is strong enough to reverse the direction of the market. Strip out rounds above $50 million and year-on-year funding turns negative. At the same time, dozens of companies now clear that threshold, so dismissing the whole cycle as one freak transaction would also be wrong.

Investor attention has rotated strongly toward Logic Semiconductors. Foundry Services has also absorbed enormous capital, although Rapidus accounts for most of that story. Sensors, Analog and several smaller categories have lost relative ground.

Capital is moving further toward scaling companies. Later-stage financings take a much larger share of activity, while follow-on rounds are several times larger at the median than first financings. New startups can still get backed, but they are playing in a very different funding bracket.

The geographic picture has shifted too. U.S. transaction activity is much stronger, Chinese deal count has fallen sharply, Europe is seeing larger checks without more deals, and Japan's headline capital is dominated by one strategically important manufacturing project.

Strategic investors are also playing a bigger role, particularly in the infrastructure surrounding AI compute. Recent activity from NVIDIA, AMD and other corporate investors shows why optical connectivity, packaging and specialized silicon are attracting capital far beyond traditional venture investors.

For now, the clearest description is a capital-intensity boom rather than a broad startup boom. Investors are paying unprecedented amounts for companies they believe can remove real bottlenecks in AI infrastructure, while the rest of the financing market looks much more ordinary.