I’ve grown completely numb to AI funding numbers.
Ten years ago, even five, an epically large seed round of hundreds of millions was unthinkable. Now, it’s started to feel oddly pedestrian to me and—the data actually bears out my ennui: Crunchbase recently calculated that, so far in 2026, over 40% of seed and Series A investment has been funneled into rounds of $100 million or more.
Examples of the last few weeks include Humans& (a frontier AI lab that raised a $480 million seed round), Ricursive Intelligence (which raised a $300 million Series A), and Merge Labs, Sam Altman’s brain-computer interface company that raised a casual $252 million seed round.
This feeling, of course, doesn’t just fixate on earlier-stage companies. I actually don’t know if there’s any funding round number at this point that would genuinely shock me. It’s an endless slog of big-number headlines with no sense of where this is all going, especially as pertains to, say, the largest companies in the space.
This week alone, reports dropped that SoftBank is in talks to invest another $30 billion in OpenAI (after previously investing $40 billion), and then there was the xAI news—that Elon Musk’s Tesla also invested in Musk’s $20 billion Series E, to the tune of $2 billion.
Musk’s companies have always been financially linked to one another in a clannish sort of way, but the reality is: All these AI startups and companies are investing in and selling to one another. This is something my colleague Jeremy Kahn has written about quite a bit, particularly in the context of Nvidia’s massive cycling cash machine.
So, there’s no number that surprises me anymore. And that worries me. Because that maybe means the only thing that could feel shocking is a crash.
ICYMI… It’s been a big earnings week for Big Tech. Some standouts include Meta, which clocked a revenue beat as shares climbed. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s slowing revenue growth spooked the markets.
See you Monday,
Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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