Venture Funding Rounds This Week: Mega-Rounds Meet the Anthropic S-1 (26 October–1 November 2026)

Venture funding rounds this week were dominated by scale. In the seven days from 26 October to 1 November 2026, the ten largest US rounds tracked by Crunchbase News alone summed to roughly $4.8 billion, led by a $2.1 billion raise for manufacturing group Re:Build and a $1 billion Series G for prediction-market operator Kalshi. Add Cohere’s Series E in Canada, Upwind’s $400 million extension in Israel and a $130 million seed for Sebastian Thrun’s Dulo, and the week looks like a late-cycle sprint rather than a pause. This roundup is part of our venture capital and finance hub, where we track rounds, exits and fund closes every week. If you missed it, last week’s roundup covered the 19–25 October window.

Which were the largest venture rounds this week?

Re:Build’s $2.1 billion raise topped the week, followed by Kalshi’s $1 billion Series G at a $40 billion post-money valuation and Bedrock Robotics’ $600 million Series C, according to Crunchbase News.

Re:Build, a six-year-old Framingham, Massachusetts group that partners with industrial companies from product design through to large-scale production, raised $2.1 billion with General Catalyst and JPMorganChase named as backers, per Crunchbase News. The round type was not disclosed. It is one of the largest single raises for a US manufacturing platform on record and reflects the reshoring narrative that has gathered pace through 2026.

Kalshi’s $1 billion Series G was led by Wellington Management and Sequoia Capital and valued the New York prediction-market operator at $40 billion post-money. The company says its annualised trading volume now exceeds $1 trillion, a run-rate figure rather than an audited annual total, as Tech-Insider notes in its summary of the same list. For a consumer-facing marketplace barely a decade old, that is an extraordinary multiple of where the company stood in 2025.

Bedrock Robotics, which retrofits heavy construction equipment with autonomy, raised $600 million at a $4.1 billion post-money valuation in a Series C led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital. Crunchbase News puts its total funding at close to $1 billion. Dren Bio, a San Carlos biotech developing antibody therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune disease, raised $350 million with Juvia Group and Lightspeed Venture Partners named, and will use the proceeds for advanced blood-cancer trials.

North of the border, Cohere announced the initial close of a Series E targeting up to C$7 billion (roughly US$5 billion) at a reported US$20.5 billion pre-money valuation, led by companies of the Schwarz Group. New participants include the Government of Canada, Bell Ventures and Bullhound Capital; Nvidia, Inovia and Prosperity7 returned. Bloomberg reported the Canadian government has agreed to invest up to $1.14 billion, per The Next Web. Cohere did not say how much of the target is committed, which is why we leave its bar off the chart below.

The second tier was crowded: Group14 Technologies added $169 million to its Series D for silicon battery materials and a planned plant in Sagunto, Spain; Firehawk Aerospace raised more than $150 million in a Series D led by Advent and Rochefort at a valuation above $1.4 billion; Serval raised $150 million from Sequoia at a $3 billion valuation for enterprise coding agents; and three $100 million rounds landed for General Compute (Series A, Blackbird and Abstract), Foundry Robotics (Series A, Marlinspike) and Hex (Peak XV and 137 Ventures, $1.2 billion valuation). The table below lists the rounds we could verify with a source.

Where did the money go by sector?

Physical AI and robotics, enterprise AI, biotech, defense and cybersecurity absorbed most of the large-round capital this week, with fintech and consumer largely absent from the top of the list.

The clearest pattern is the shift from software-only AI to AI that touches atoms. Re:Build (manufacturing), Bedrock Robotics (construction autonomy), Foundry Robotics (autonomous factories), Group14 (battery materials) and Dulo (foundation models for hardware design) together took well over $3 billion. Dulo’s $130 million seed, first reported by The Information and summarised by AI Weekly, is a reminder that the seed label has stopped describing stage and now describes founder pedigree; Sebastian Thrun’s Waymo and Google Brain alumni effectively raised a Series B on day one.

Enterprise AI remained the deepest pool. Serval, Hex and General Compute each raised $100 million or more, and Cohere’s Series E shows that sovereign and corporate buyers are still prepared to fund independent model labs outside the US hyperscaler orbit. Defense held its ground through Firehawk’s propulsion round and, on the exit side, Salesforce’s reported purchase of Rune Technologies. Biotech had one standout in Dren Bio, while cybersecurity’s week was carried by Upwind, which Runtime Wire reports extended its round by about $100 million to $400 million at an unchanged $3.8 billion valuation.

Against that, consumer, climate and fintech were quiet at the top end. The best-funded fintech item was a public-market move: Kalshi, if you count prediction markets as fintech. For a longer-run view of where venture dollars are concentrating, see our analysis of venture capital investment by sector, 2024–2026.

Which regions outside the US raised?

Canada (Cohere), Israel (Upwind, Bites), India ($130M across 32 deals), Germany (Qwello) and MENA fund closes in Egypt, the UAE and Oman were the non-US highlights this week.

Europe. The week was thinner than the €1.5 billion the previous week delivered, at least in what we could verify. Munich’s Qwello secured up to €55 million in growth equity from the ABN AMRO Sustainable Impact Fund and existing shareholders, including Tiger Infrastructure Partners, for EV charging infrastructure. In the UK, household-management AI startup Nous raised $17 million led by Heartcore Capital, and simulation startup adsilico closed a £10 million Series A led by PXN Ventures with Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk. Finland’s Volare raised €7.1 million from Springvest and Maki.vc, and Germany’s roadsurfer gained Kennedy Lewis Investment Management as majority shareholder, per Startup.eu. The biggest European headline, however, was an exit: Guidewire’s $1.7 billion agreement for London’s hyperexponential, which we cover below. Our guide to the top venture capital firms in the UK and Europe profiles the investors most active in these rounds.

India. Inc42 counted 32 funded startups raising about $130.2 million, down roughly 29% from the previous week’s $184 million but with nearly double the deal count. Cent’s $15 million Series A (Blume Ventures, South Park Commons) for diagnostics led, followed by Simplismart’s $14 million Series B led by Dallas Venture Capital with Nvidia and Accel participating, Live2.ai’s $13.7 million pre-Series B from IvyCap, Troovy’s $10.5 million Series B and Matiks’ $10 million pre-Series A from General Catalyst. Ecommerce led by deal count with nine rounds worth $33.4 million, and Blume Ventures and Antler were the most active investors with three deals each. Separately, Unacademy co-founders Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini are reported to be raising a ₹700 crore fund, Longshot Capital, for AI and deeptech.

Southeast Asia and wider Asia. DealStreetAsia flagged Singapore’s Ailytics with a $7.4 million Series A led by Tin Men Capital, an up-to-$250 million IFC debt package for India’s JBM Auto and its electric-mobility units, and a draft prospectus from TPG-backed Asia OneHealthcare in Malaysia. In Australia, MP Space raised about $16 million in seed funding led by Blackbird. On the fund side, TPG closed a $1.3 billion debut Asia growth-equity vehicle. See our ranking of the top venture capital firms in India and Southeast Asia for who is writing cheques in the region.

China, Japan and Korea. The dominant story remained DeepSeek. TechCrunch reported on 22 October that the model lab was wrapping up a round of roughly $15 billion backed by Tencent and CATL, and newsletters this week continued to describe the round as closing. We treat the figure as reported rather than confirmed. DealStreetAsia also noted HSG’s acquisition of an approximately 80% stake in China’s PeierTech. No Japanese or Korean round large enough to make our table surfaced in the sources we checked.

Gulf, Israel and Turkey. Israel finished October with at least $872 million raised across 14 rounds and extensions, according to Calcalist, and the last week of the month supplied two of them: Upwind’s expansion to $400 million and Bites’ $40 million Series A for AI-driven frontline training. In MENA, Wamda recorded Morocco’s ABA Life securing $40 million from Admaius Capital Partners, Egypt’s NoorNation raising a $1.05 million seed, and a cluster of fund closes: Tanmiya Capital Ventures’ $130 million Fund II backed by the EIB, IFC and EBRD, DPI’s Nclude Fund at more than $112 million, BY Venture Partners’ $60 million Fund III in the UAE, and Oman’s Phaze Ventures launching two AI funds targeting more than $75 million. We found no Turkish round of note in the week, which fits the post-Webrazzi Summit lull. Our profile of the top venture capital firms in the Middle East, Turkey and Israel covers the regional investors behind these deals.

What seed and Series A rounds stood out?

Dulo’s $130 million seed, the $100 million Series A rounds for General Compute and Foundry Robotics, and India’s Cent and BioStack were the early-stage deals worth noting.

The early-stage market is now two markets. At one end, founders with an exit or a frontier-lab résumé raise nine-figure first rounds: Dulo’s $130 million seed, General Compute’s $100 million Series A from Blackbird and Abstract for an inference cloud built on Cerebras, SambaNova and Positron chips, and Foundry Robotics’ $100 million Series A from Marlinspike. At the other, the median seed deal looks much like it did in 2023. We described this split in our piece on the venture capital barbell effect, and this week’s numbers reinforce it.

Outside the AI-infrastructure bracket, the more conventional early rounds were still instructive. BioStack’s $9.5 million seed in India brought together Peak XV, Afore Capital, DCVC and Y Combinator, a cap table that would have been unusual for an Indian life-science seed two years ago. Matiks’ $10 million pre-Series A from General Catalyst shows that US growth investors are reaching down the stack in India’s gaming sector. In the UK, adsilico’s £10 million Series A for AI-powered simulation was led by a specialist fund, PXN Ventures, with university-linked Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk alongside, the typical structure for British deeptech. Israel’s Bites raised a $40 million Series A, large for the stage, on the strength of a product that turns company procedures into short training videos.

Two smaller rounds reported by New Economies also fit the pattern: Dream, a construction-AI startup, raised a $17 million seed from a16z, and Mintive raised a $7 million seed led by Cowboy Ventures for AI agents. We were unable to verify these against a second source, so treat the amounts as reported.

Which exits, IPO filings and acquisitions landed?

Anthropic’s public S-1, DoorDash’s roughly $17 billion agreement to buy Instacart, Guidewire’s $1.7 billion hyperexponential deal and Salesforce’s reported $375 million purchase of Rune headlined the exit column.

On Monday 26 October, Anthropic publicly filed its S-1 to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the offering, per Yahoo Finance. The prospectus disclosed first-half 2026 revenue of $16.3 billion against $4.6 billion for all of 2025, and a first-half net loss reported at $80.7 billion, a figure that reflects enormous compute commitments and non-cash charges and which analysts will spend the coming weeks dissecting. Reports put the expected listing valuation at around $2 trillion, up from $965 billion in May, with the IPO described as weeks away. For venture investors, this is the largest potential distribution event in the asset class’s history; our table of the biggest venture-backed exits by year will need a new top row.

In M&A, DoorDash announced on 29 October that it will acquire Instacart for $65 per share, about $17 billion, a 26% premium to Instacart’s close on 22 October, the last trading day before deal reports, per the Associated Press. Closing is expected at the end of 2027 or the first half of 2028, which signals a long antitrust review. Guidewire signed a definitive agreement to acquire London-based hyperexponential, an AI-native underwriting and pricing platform for commercial P&C insurers, for $1.7 billion in cash plus up to $400 million contingent on recurring-revenue targets, funded with a $1 billion term loan and cash, per iTWire. It is one of the largest exits for a UK insurtech to date.

In defense, Resilience Media reported that Salesforce is paying $375 million in shares and cash for Rune Technologies, a Washington, DC startup building AI logistics software for the military that had raised about $30 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Point72 Ventures and IQT and was last valued around $134 million. Neither company commented. Smaller deals included Freshworks acquiring Israel’s Robusta Dev, Protectt.ai agreeing to take a controlling stake in Bosch-incubated AIShield, and HSG’s purchase of a majority of PeierTech in China. In Malaysia, TPG-backed Asia OneHealthcare filed a draft prospectus, adding to a Bursa Malaysia pipeline that DealStreetAsia says has already produced 47 listings and about $1.5 billion of proceeds in the first nine months of the year.

Which VC funds closed?

Disruptive’s $10 billion late-stage megafund, AP Ventures’ $300 million Fund III, TPG’s $1.3 billion Asia growth fund and four MENA vehicles were the fund closes of the week.

The headline close belonged to Dallas-based Disruptive, which Bloomberg reported has raised a $10 billion fund to make roughly ten late-stage bets of about $1 billion each in AI, defense and software, replacing its earlier deal-by-deal SPV model, per AI Weekly. The firm’s portfolio includes Groq, ElevenLabs, Databricks and Shield AI, and it reports returning more than $6 billion on about $1.9 billion invested. Founder Alex Davis has said the firm cannot write small cheques. A single discretionary pool of that size makes Disruptive a competitor to crossover funds and sovereign investors for the largest private rounds, and it is relevant to the top venture capital firms in the United States that have historically led those rounds.

In industrial and climate tech, London-headquartered AP Ventures announced the $300 million final close of Fund III on 28 October, focused on low-carbon molecules including hydrogen, carbon capture and utilisation, and advanced recycling for hard-to-abate sectors, with sovereign wealth funds, corporates, pensions and family offices among the LPs, per National Law Review. In Asia, TPG closed its $1.3 billion debut Asia growth-equity fund, and Advent International wrapped up roughly $30 billion across its eleventh flagship and a mid-market fund, with Asia-Pacific coverage of China, Japan, India, Australia and New Zealand. Italy’s Z_One Fund reported a first close of more than €35 million against a €60 million target for early-stage AI, backed by CDP Venture Capital, Zest and Lazio Innova.

The MENA closes listed above (Tanmiya $130M, Nclude $112M+, BY Venture Partners $60M, Phaze Ventures’ two AI funds) show that Egyptian, Emirati and Omani managers are still able to reach final close with development-finance anchors even as global fundraising stays slow. New Economies also reported Entourage closing a $112 million Fund II for European early-stage deals and Begin Capital closing a $100 million Fund II for AI infrastructure, chips and robotics; we could not independently confirm either. For a running list of managers still in market, see our tracker of venture capital funds currently raising in 2026.

What does this week say about the market?

Capital is concentrating in fewer, larger rounds and in physical AI, while the exit window is reopening at the very top through Anthropic’s filing and strategic M&A.

Three signals stand out. First, the mega-round is no longer exceptional. In one week, the US alone produced two rounds above $1 billion and seven more at $100 million or above; Cohere, Upwind and DeepSeek add three more outside the US. Crunchbase News called the week’s lineup robust, and the data support that reading. Second, the money is going into capital-intensive categories: manufacturing platforms, construction autonomy, battery plants, rocket propulsion and inference clouds. These businesses need balance sheets, which explains why banks (JPMorganChase), governments (Canada) and corporates (Schwarz Group) are showing up on cap tables next to Sequoia and General Catalyst.

Third, distributions are finally in sight. Anthropic’s S-1 is the largest venture-backed IPO filing ever, and DoorDash–Instacart, Guidewire–hyperexponential and Salesforce–Rune show strategic buyers paying real multiples for AI-native and defense assets. If the ANT listing prices anywhere near the reported $2 trillion, limited partners in Anthropic’s early backers will see distributions that dwarf the entire 2024 exit market, and that liquidity tends to recycle into new fund commitments within two or three quarters.

The counterweight is the rest of the market. India’s weekly total fell 29% even as deal count nearly doubled, Europe’s verifiable rounds were modest, and no Turkish round surfaced at all. The barbell we have described all year, with huge rounds at one end and small, slow seed deals at the other, is still the right mental model. Middle-of-the-road Series B and C companies without an AI or defense story remain the hardest raises in the market.

What should founders raising now take from it?

Founders should expect long diligence on capital intensity, prepare for strategic and sovereign investors on the cap table, and treat M&A as a live alternative to a flat growth round.

If you are building in physical AI, defense or AI infrastructure, this week shows the capital is there, but it comes with questions about unit economics, supply chains and contract backlogs that software founders rarely faced. Re:Build, Bedrock and Group14 all raised on the strength of production milestones and customer commitments, not demos. Founders in these categories should run their fundraising process and timeline with a nine-to-twelve-month runway buffer, because diligence on plants and contracts takes longer than diligence on ARR.

If you are outside those categories, the Rune and hyperexponential deals are the more useful comparables. Rune had raised about $30 million and was valued around $134 million; a $375 million strategic sale less than three years after founding is an outcome most growth rounds cannot match on a risk-adjusted basis. Keep a relationship with the two or three strategics most likely to buy you, even while you raise. Finally, note who led this week’s rounds: Sequoia appeared twice, General Catalyst three times across rounds and exits, and sovereign or corporate money appeared in Canada, Germany and Egypt. Build those relationships early.

We will be back next Monday with the 2–8 November roundup, which should include the first read on Anthropic’s roadshow pricing. In the meantime, browse all Deals & Insights for earlier weeks and sector deep dives.

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