In the first half of 2026, global equity funding to artificial intelligence (AI) companies reached a record of US$387.5 billion, representing a remarkable increase of 239.3% year-over-year (YoY) from US$114.2 billion during the same period in 2025, new data released by CB Insights show.

The driving force behind this surge was the influx of billion-dollar rounds of funding into growth- and late-stage startups as these ventures continued to scale by investing in compute infrastructure, AI model development, and product expansion.

In the second quarter of 2026, AI equity funding reached US$149.5 billion, a decrease from US$237.6 billion in Q1 2026. Anthropic carried much of that weight, securing a substantial US$65 billion Series H in May 2026, or 44% of all AI equity funding during the quarter.

Founded in 2021 by a group of executives and researchers who defected from OpenAI, Anthropic is best known for its family of Claude AI models, which power products like its popular coding assistant, Claude Code. The company has found early success selling to enterprises including PwC, Thomson Reuters, Stripe, and Shopify.

In Q1 2026, Anthropic generated US$4.8 billion in revenue, a source familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal. The company expects a 130% revenue surge to US$10.9 billion in Q2 2026, a growth that would allow it to turn an operating profit for the first time.

In June, Anthropic confidentially filed its initial public offering (IPO) prospectus with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to Bloomberg, the company could hit the public markets as soon as October.

Besides Anthropic’s US$65.8 billion Series H, ten other AI startups raised billion-dollar rounds in Q2 2026, and a total of 22 billion-dollar transactions have been recorded so far this year, data from CB Insights show. This underscores sustained investor appetite for AI alongside the significant capital requirements needed to build and scale these companies.

The billion-dollar rounds in Q2 2026 were:

• Anthropic’s US$65.8 billion Series H;
• Prometheus’s US$12 billion Series B;
• DeepSeek’s US$7.4 billion Series A;
• Anduril Industries’s US$5 billion Series H;
• Isomorphic Labs’s US$2.1 billion Series B;
• Moonshot AI’s US$2 billion round;
• Baseten’s US$1.5 billion Series F;
• Neura Robotics’s US$1.4 billion Series C;
• Ineffable Intelligence’s US$1.1 billion seed funding;
• Cognition’s US$1 billion Series D; and
• AppsFlyer’s US$1 billion Series E.

37 new AI unicorns

The surge in AI funding in Q2 2026 also led to a surge in valuations. During the quarter, 37 new AI unicorns were minted, the highest total since Q2 2022 and up from 32 quarter-over-quarter (QoQ).

Large language model (LLM) developer DeepSeek, valued US$59.2 billion, and Jeff Bezos-backed physical AI startup Prometheus, valued US$41 billion, led the cohort of new AI unicorns by valuation.

DeepSeek is a Chinese AI company founded in 2023 that develops LLMs, reasoning systems, and chat assistants similar to ChatGPT. It is widely known for building high-performance models at a fraction of the cost and computing power used by Western tech firms.

DeepSeek is preparing to go public with plans to file its IPO as early as this year. The company is also reportedly looking to double the size of all of its departments in a push to compete with both domestic rivals and global leaders.

Prometheus is a US-based AI startup co-founded by Bezos. The project launched in November 2025 with US$6.2 billion in funding and plans to use AI technology to improve engineering and manufacturing in the fields of computing, aerospace, and automobiles.

Other new AI unicorns created in Q2 2026 include DriveNets from Israel, CtrlS Datacenters from India, and Ineffable Intelligence from the UK.

DriveNets specializes in high-scale networking software for AI infrastructure and service providers. The company secured a US$410 million Series D in June, giving it a US$8.5 billion valuation.

CtrlS Datacenters, founded in 2007, operates 19 data centers across nine key markets in India. The company is developing AI-ready and hyperscale infrastructure to support the country’s rapidly growing digital economy, and plans to expand into international markets across the Middle East and Southeast Asia, with Thailand as its first overseas market.

CtrlS Datacenters raised INR 70 billion (US$740.54 million) in June, reaching a US$5.2 billion valuation.

Finally, Ineffable Intelligence is an AI research company that aims to create a “superlearner” system that discovers knowledge from its own experience. The company was founded in 2025 by David Silver, Professor of Computer Science at the University College London and former Google DeepMind researcher.

Ineffable Intelligence’s US$1.1 billion seed round in April gave it a valuation of US$5.1 billion.

There are now 671 AI unicorn startups around the world, with 66.6% of them, or 447, located in the US.

Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Switzerland, based on image by thanyakij-12 via Magnific