Startup Funding: Q1 2026


The new year started off with a bang for private semiconductor companies, with 18 garnering mega funding rounds exceeding $100 million, and two, Rapidus and Cerebras, reaching the $1 billion mark. Predictably, the vast majority of those are either designing chips primarily for AI inference workloads or attempting to overcome bandwidth limitations by improving interconnects from the chip level t... » read more

Startup Funding: Q4 2025


The promise of AI dominated the last quarter of 2025. Investors were eager to claim stakes in both brand-new startups and more established companies developing AI-specific hardware, primarily for data centers, with over $1 billion alone flowing into the sector. The largest round of the quarter went to a new entrant aiming to fundamentally change how AI compute is performed, while two in-memory ... » read more

Startup Funding: Q1 2025


The first quarter of 2025 saw six companies raise at least $100 million in investment. Of those, three went to quantum hardware companies, with major investment into neutral atom, superconducting, and hybrid quantum control approaches. AI chips and enabling technology were another big winner in the quarter, with companies developing optical communications tech for chips and data center infra... » read more