AI funding by series: seed to Series E since July

Frontier labs get the headlines (see the 2026 mega-rounds), but most AI money goes to companies building on top of the models. This post lists 38 rounds announced between July 1 and October 12, 2026, grouped by stage, leaving out the frontier labs.

The sample leans toward large rounds, because that is what gets reported. Where a source gives only the week of a round, we show the week. "Reportedly" marks claims with a single or aggregator-only source.

The quarter in context

Per Crunchbase, global venture funding was $159B in Q3 2026: down 25% from Q2 but up 53% on Q3 2025. AI companies took $102B of it (64%). By stage, late-stage rounds totalled $105B, early stage $40.6B and seed $13B. There were a record 27 billion-dollar rounds.

Seed

Company	What it does	Amount	Lead	Date
Hang Ten Systems	AI strategy and software modernisation for large enterprises	$53M extension ($85M total seed)	Xora (Temasek)	Sep 16
AIR	Security controls for agent skills, plugins and MCP servers	$50M (seed + follow-on)	Sequoia, Greenoaks	Sep 1
Catalyst	Trading agents for retail investors, with a human approving each step	$30M	Sequoia	Oct 8
Keenable	100B-document web search index for agents	$26M	Accel	Aug 25
Empirik	Predicts infrastructure outages from system changes	$21M	Sequoia	Sep 1
Aslan Protects	Supervised AI agents for cyber defence	$20.8M (reportedly)	Khosla, XYZ	early Sep
Healthleap	Flags hospital patients with possibly undiagnosed conditions	$8M	Sequoia, First Round	Oct 7
Melius	Generates ad campaigns, images and video	$5M	General Catalyst	Oct 6

Median: $23.5M. Half of these seeds were $26M or more, sizes that used to be a Series A. One round was too big to fit the stage: River AI, a reinforcement-learning lab, raised $1.1B across seed and Series A in August.

Series A

Company	What it does	Amount	Valuation	Lead	Date
Prime Intellect	Compute and RL tooling for companies building their own agents	$130M	$1B	Radical Ventures	Jul 8
State Affairs	AI platform for policy and regulation	$70M	—	Khosla, Founders Fund	week of Jul 11
Jack & Jill	Hiring marketplace with an agent for each side	$40M	—	Air Street Capital	Sep 15
AIUC	Audits, certifies and insures AI agents	$40M	—	Ribbit Capital	Sep 15
Healthleap	Hospital patient flagging (see seed)	$30M	—	Hummingbird	Oct 7
Kastle	Agents for consumer-lending operations	$24M	—	Insight Partners	Sep 18
Basalt Health	Automates referrals into post-acute care	$20M	—	NEA	Sep 24
Melius	Ad and creative generation (see seed)	$20M	—	CRV	Oct 6

Median: $35M. Healthleap and Melius announced their seed and Series A together, so their first two rounds came within months of each other.

Series B

Company	What it does	Amount	Valuation	Lead	Date
Meshy AI	Models for AI-generated 3D content	$400M	$1.5B	Monolith, IDG, Matrix China	week of Jul 18
Armadin	Offensive security using swarms of AI agents	$255.5M	over $2.5B	a16z, Accel	Oct 1
Instinct	Consumer agent that books, buys and calls over SMS	$250M	$2.5B	Index, Benchmark	Aug 26
Arena	Crowdsourced model leaderboard and paid evals	$200M	$3.1B	Lightspeed, Khosla	Oct 8
Arcee AI	Open-weight models	$150M	over $1B	Vista, Cambium, Emergence	week of Sep 12
Ema	Agent teams for HR, IT and finance work	$77M	—	Creaegis	Sep 23
Firecrawl	Web data for AI agents	$75M	—	Smash Capital	Sep 22

Median: $200M, at a median disclosed valuation of about $2.5B.

Series C

Company	What it does	Amount	Valuation	Lead	Date
Instinct	Consumer agent (see Series B)	$1B	$10B	Sequoia, Benchmark, Coatue named	Sep 28
Lovable	Builds apps from prompts	$400M	$13.3B	Menlo, Scaleup Europe Fund	Aug 12
HappyRobot	Agents for calls, email and scheduling in logistics	$150M	$1.2B	Prysm, Eurazeo	Aug 4
CodeRabbit	AI code review	$143M	$1.5B (reportedly)	Atomico, Smash Capital	week of Aug 8
Zenity	Security and governance for enterprise agents	$125M	—	Norwest	Aug 4
Norm Ai	Legal and compliance agents	$120M	$1.2B	Khosla	Jul 7
Heidi Health	AI clinical scribe	$100M equity (+$240M non-dilutive)	$900M	Blackbird	Sep 22
Metaview	Recruiting agents	$60M	—	Insight Partners	Sep 30

Median: $134M. That is below the Series B median, but only because our Series B list is dominated by the big rounds Crunchbase lists each week. Don't read it as a trend.

Series D and later

Company	What it does	Stage	Amount	Valuation	Lead	Date
Cognition	The Devin coding agent	Series E	over $2B	$48B	a16z, Accel	Sep 8
Fireworks AI	Custom models and inference for enterprises	Series D	$1.5B	$17.5B	Atreides, Index, TCV	week of Jul 11
Harvey	AI for legal teams	Unlabelled	$550M	$15.5B	Diffusion, Lightspeed	Sep 9
Temporal	Durable execution for agents and workflows	Series E	$550M	$12.55B	Lightspeed	Sep 14
Snorkel AI	Expert-built training and eval data for AI labs	Series E	$350M	$3.5B	Insight, S32	Sep 22
Factory	Coding agents for enterprise teams	Unlabelled	$200M	$5B	none named	Sep 15
Profound	Helps brands appear in AI answers	Series D	$180M	$1.8B	Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins	week of Sep 12

Median: $550M, at a median valuation of $12.55B.

Three other notable rounds had no stage label: Manus (over $500M, led by Boyu and IDG), EliseAI ($350M at $4B) and Supabase ($150M, led by GIC).

Round sizes at a glance

Stage	Rounds	Median	Range
Seed	8	$23.5M	$5M–$53M
Series A	8	$35M	$20M–$130M
Series B	7	$200M	$75M–$400M
Series C	8	$134M	$60M–$1B
Series D+	7	$550M	$180M–$2B+

What the numbers say

Coding agents and agent infrastructure took most of the money. Of about $9.4B across these rounds, agent infrastructure, data and models (Fireworks, Temporal, Snorkel, Arena, Arcee, Prime Intellect and others) took about 32%. Coding agents (Cognition, Lovable, Factory, CodeRabbit) took about 29%, and Cognition's round alone was about a fifth of the sample.

Valuations are moving within weeks, not years.

• Instinct: $2.5B to $10B in about a month.
• Factory: $1.5B in April to $5B in September.
• Temporal: $5B in February to $12.55B in September.
• Cognition: $26B in May to $48B in September. The company says its run-rate revenue went from $492M to almost $900M over the same period.

Securing agents is now a funding category. Armadin, Zenity, AIR, AIUC and Aslan Protects raised about $490M at every stage from seed to Series C. Armadin reached a valuation above $2.5B about seven months after coming out of stealth.

Vertical AI raises often, in smaller amounts. Legal is the exception: Harvey and Norm Ai both have billion-dollar valuations. Health, lending and recruiting rounds mostly sit between $20M and $100M.

On the radar, Temporal is already on Dev & Cloud in Adopt, and Devin and Supabase are on the Overall radar. CodeRabbit, Fireworks AI and Factory aren't on any radar yet; we're looking at them for a future edition.