led the raise, which brings the Austin-based startup’s total funding to $40 million since its 2022 inception. Returning backers , , and also participated in the round. ClearJet’s earlier investors include , formerly JetBlue Ventures, and .

ClearJet’s model is straightforward. Rather than build its own fleet of planes or trucks, it connects shippers with unused cargo capacity on commercial flights already traveling between U.S. cities to move e-commerce packages around the U.S. Customers include major multibillion-dollar retailers, e-commerce platforms, 3PLs and marketplaces.

In just three years, the startup has built what founder and CEO calls a “super carrier,” a network that now spans 95 U.S. airports and connects retailers with major U.S. airlines and multiple final-mile delivery providers. This network gives retailers a way to ship packages so that they travel directly between cities on passenger planes already in the air rather than through the traditional networks used by major parcel carriers.

Unlike a traditional parcel carrier, ClearJet doesn’t own the planes transporting those packages. Instead, its asset-light “Uber for cargo” model taps available capacity on flights that are already traveling between cities. The startup says its approach can cut shipping costs by as much as 35% while speeding deliveries by one to three days.

“We’re basically connecting with the already moving aircraft,” Guggenheim told ������Ƶ News in an interview. “These flights are going from A to B city. We’re taking those same routes, and that’s just why we’re so fast. That’s also why we’re so cost efficient.”

The approach appears to be working. ClearJet is profitable, its revenue has more than tripled year over year, and it is approaching nine figures in top-line revenue, according to Guggenheim.

The market opportunity is still large. The startup says it moves more than 30 million packages annually, which is still a fraction of the roughly 1.8 billion U.S. parcels it considers eligible to move by air.

Global funding to supply chain management and logistics startups has reached $8.4 billion in 2026 so far, per ������Ƶ . This puts this year on pace to top 2025’s total of $9 billion considering we have over four months left in the year.

How it works

Retailers connect to ClearJet through an API and can generate a two-day shipping label. ClearJet picks up the packages, takes them to an airport, handles sorting and screening, places them on commercial flights, and then injects them into final-mile networks at their destination. Those providers can include , the , , , and , Guggenheim said.

“We call it the super carrier because it truly is that, and it gives all the power back to the retailer,” Guggenheim said in an interview with ������Ƶ News.

One of ClearJet’s first large retail customers had previously relied on FedEx for goods arriving from Asia, with deliveries taking seven days from factory to customer, according to Guggenheim. Under ClearJet’s model, products arrive at Los Angeles International Airport, where the company takes possession of the cargo, sorts it and flies it into 14 different airports before handing the packages to final-mile carriers.

The result, Guggenheim said, was a reduction in delivery time from seven days to five — and $35 million in cost savings for the customers.

That combination of time and cost savings was what caught Edison Partners’ attention.

, who leads the firm’s vertical SaaS and AI practice, told ������Ƶ News that Edison had spent years looking at ways to use excess capacity in supply chains without requiring companies to make massive investments in physical infrastructure.

“We looked at a few supply chain businesses over the years,” Ziegler said. “Candidly, most of them went bankrupt because they took an asset-heavy approach to the middle mile.”

ClearJet took the asset-light approach. And the company’s airline relationships, regional sortation infrastructure, regulatory license and technology architecture make it difficult to copy its model, according to Ziegler.

“When you think about what they built, it is a very unique aviation infrastructure platform, and it’s difficult to replicate,” he said. “He’s [Guggenheim] proven the business model, and the unit economics work.”

Backstory

The idea for ClearJet grew out of Guggenheim’s own frustrations as a longtime e-commerce entrepreneur.

He started his first company in 1997 after meeting and his family and building direct-to-fan e-commerce businesses for them. Guggenheim later worked with a range of music and sports clients, including helping launch the first beyonce.com. His company went on to support more than 2,000 Plus stores with over $1 billion in GMV, he said.

Along the way, logistics became one of his biggest headaches.

Shipping had become the second-largest cost of goods outside of the product itself for his business, he said. And in 2019, after spending $55 million with , Guggenheim said he received an email giving him five days’ notice that his account was being canceled because it wasn’t profitable enough.

“And so I said, ‘there has to be a better way,’ ” he said.

Guggenheim began thinking about the thousands of domestic passenger flights traveling around the U.S. every day and wondering whether their unused cargo space could become part of an alternative parcel network.

He had no connections with the airlines, he said, so he began cold-emailing executives until he reached the president of . At a cargo industry event, Guggenheim got about five minutes to pitch his idea in what he now calls his “Shark Tank moment.”

“I said, ‘I want to start flying packages from LA to New York. Do you have any flights?’” Guggenheim recalled. “And he put his arm around me and said, ‘You and I are going to be best friends.’”

Guggenheim went on to build relationships with , , , and , the latter of which participated in an earlier ClearJet financing. He also began recruiting people from the airline and parcel industries and building the technology underpinning the network. ClearJet formally launched in May 2023.

One logistical obstacle was the aircraft themselves. Guggenheim said most U.S. passenger aircraft are narrow-body planes whose cargo doors are too small to accommodate the pallets typically moved by freight forwarders.

ClearJet addressed this by designing its own overpack bags specifically for e-commerce parcels. Those bags can travel through airports much like passenger luggage before being unloaded and handed to the appropriate delivery company.

AI component

ClearJet’s AI models choose each parcel’s path based on cost, speed and geography across its network. AI is also built into how ClearJet routes packages. Its models choose a parcel’s path based on factors including cost, speed and geography.

The company is also developing AI agents to automate more of the operational work around those shipments.

For example, ClearJet is creating AI agents to handle tasks such as rating, booking, tracking and managing delivery problems, according to Guggenheim.

This includes features such as responding to weather disruptions by moving packages onto a different flight or through a different city, something ClearJet can do because it isn’t tied to just one airline.

“We’re building an entire agent team, an army of agents that do everything that the humans were doing,” Guggenheim said.

ClearJet raised its seed round in early 2023 and $13.4 million in a Series A in 2024, according to Guggenheim. He declined to disclose the company’s valuation but described the Series B as a significant step-up from its previous financing.

Next, ClearJet plans to expand into returns and international shipping, and expand its network of airports. Guggenheim also wants to give consumers much more detailed visibility into where packages are during their journeys, similar to the real-time experience they have become accustomed to with services such as DoorDash.

“We have a really big appetite for giving consumers a better visual experience with their packages,” he said.

For Ziegler, the bigger bet is that ClearJet can become infrastructure for a delivery market increasingly built around getting products directly to individual consumers.

“We saw this as an opportunity to actually create a category-defining business,” he said.

ClearJet has just under 50 full-time employees and hundreds of contractors operating seven days a week.

Related ������Ƶ query:

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Ten of those companies were AI labs, collectively valued at $65 billion. The most well-known was Beijing-based open source model developer — at $50 billion, the highest valued new unicorn to join the ������Ƶ this year.

The new unicorn frontier labs are focused on new architectures in AI model development in robotics, physics and self-learning, as well as on open source development, and in the case of one India-based startup, sovereign AI.

Other leading sectors with multiple companies were in robotics and AI infrastructure, with four companies in each.

Of the new unicorns, 16 are U.S-based, while eight are from China. Two new unicorns joined the board from India, Germany and the United Kingdom and one each from Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and Saudi Arabia.

Big exits remove a trillion

Despite the influx of newcomers, the total value of The ������Ƶ ������Ƶ dropped by more than $1 trillion in June as , its most valuable company, went public.

Other notable exits from the board last month were , the maker of AI coding tool Cursor, which was acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion after last being valued at $29.3 billion. , an AI infrastructure company that operates as a layer on top of GPUs, was acquired by , and customer experience agent was purchased by 1, both for well above their last private valuations.

New unicorns in June

Here are June’s new unicorn companies:

AI labs

• Hangzhou-based raised a $7.4 billion Series A, its first external financing, in a deal led by CEO . The 2-year-old company was valued at $50 billion and is said to be planning to list in as early as Q2 2027.
• is building a new AI architecture based on neuroscience called Cortex AI that promises lower power use. It raised a $500 million Series A from , , and . The less than 1-year-old New York-based company was valued at $2.5 billion.
• London-based , an AI for physical product design in aerospace, defense, energy, automotive and semiconductors, raised a $300 million Series C led by . The 6-year-old company was valued at $2.4 billion.
• , a model developer for robotics trained on gaming videos from its sister company , raised a $320 million Series A led by . The 1-year-old New York-based company was valued at $2.3 billion.
• , an embodied robotics intelligence company, raised a $400 million Series B led by . The 2-year-old San Mateo, California-based company with researchers from and was valued at $2 billion.
• Shanghai-based , a�� robotics intelligence company, raised a $220 million seed round led by and . The less than 1-year-old company founded by an researcher was valued at $2 billion.
• , a builder of world models to simulate the real world impacting robotics, science, healthcare and defense, raised a $310 million Series B led by . The 2-year-old Menlo Park, California-based company was valued at $1.5 billion.
• Bengaluru-based , an Indian sovereign AI developer, raised a $234 million Series B first close led by . The 3-year-old company was valued at $1.5 billion.
• , an AI lab seeking to automate AI research for scientific use cases, raised a $200 million seed funding led by and . The less than 1-year-old San Francisco-based company was valued at $1 billion.
• Hangzhou-based , a 3D model developer used in gaming, entertainment and product design, raised a $200 million Series A led by . The 3-year-old company was valued at $1 billion.

Robotics

• Germany-based , a physical AI company building intelligent machines to to work alongside humans, raised a $1.4 billion Series C led by stablecoin issuer among other strategic and growth investors. The 7-year-old company, with $1 billion in its order pipeline and strategic deployments, was said to be valued at $7 billion.
• Shenzhen-based , a builder of humanoid robots, raised a $148 million Series B led by . The 3-year-old company was valued at $1.5 billion.
• Guangdong-based , a humanoid robotics company, raised a $147 million Series B. The 5-year-old company, which projects 1,000 shipments in 2026, was valued at $1.5 billion.
• , a builder of industrial arm robotics for manufacturing that said its technology learns through demonstration, raised a $200 million Series C led by and . The 9-year-old New York-based company was valued at $1 billion.

AI infrastructure

• , which pivoted from crypto mining to data center build out for AI, raised a $400 million funding led by , and . The 2-year-old Coral Gables, Florida-based company was valued at $2.4 billion. The company has filed for a direct listing on .
• Las Vegas-based , a cloud operator that offers customer AMD chips, raised a $350 million Series B led by and . The 2-year-old company was valued at $1.6 billion.
• Beijing-based , an inference solution offering customers API access to hundreds of models, raised a $296 million Series B. The 2-year-old company was valued at $1.2 billion.
• , an AI developer cloud to train, fine-tune and deploy AI, raised a $100 million Series A led by . The 4-year-old New Jersey-based company valued at $1 billion has 1 million developers using the platform.

Defense

• , a precision weapons company enabling existing weaponry to defend against unmanned drones, raised a $200 million Series B led by . The 4-year-old Austin-based company was valued at $2.2 billion.
• , a manufacturer of unmanned aerospace and defense systems, raised a $300 million Series C led by and . The 3-year-old Huntington Beach, California-based company was valued at $1.8 billion.
• , a cyber intelligence company building products for the U.S. military, raised a $100 million Series B led by , and . The 1-year-old Arlington, Virginia-based company was valued at $1 billion.

Proptech

• Montreal-based , a mortgage financing platform, raised a $217 million Series E round. The 8-year-old company was valued at $1.1 billion.
• India-based ,�� a property brokerage that also owns a mortgage marketplace, a property management platform, and a home interior brand raised a $95 million private equity and debt financing led by . The 13-year-old company was valued at $1 billion.

Data analytics

• Belgium-based , an intelligence platform for global physical trade, raised a $1 billion secondary market funding led by . The 12-year-old company was valued at $3.7 billion.

Biotechnology

• , a biotech company focused on reverse cellular aging, raised a $435 million Series C led by . The 4-year-old San Francisco-based company with plans for clinical trials next year for human liver cells, was valued at $3.1 billion.

Materials

• Cambridge, U.K.-based�� , building a network of labs using AI for new material discovery, raised a $450 million funding led by and . The 2-year-old company was valued at $2.6 billion.

Cryptocurrency

• , a blockchain and smart contract solution for global financial institutions, raised a $355 million Series F led by . The 12-year-old New York-based company was valued at $2 billion.

Image generation

• Beijing-based , a video generation company, raised a $300 million Series B led by , and . The 3-year-old company was valued at $2 billion and says it has built a creator community of more than 30 million users. As of May 2026 the company has $300 million in annual recurring revenue.

Financial services

• Saudi Arabia-based , a mobile banking company, raised a $400 million Series A. The 6-year-old company was valued at $1.6 billion.

Semiconductor

• Rotterdam-based , a 3D metrology inspection tool for semiconductor manufacturing, raised a $380 million Series D led by . The 10-year-old company was valued at $1.6 billion.

Aerospace

• Beijing-based , a space infrastructure and satellite company, raised a $207 million Series D. The 10-year-old company was valued at $1.5 billion.

E-commerce

• , an e-commerce provider that supports customer interactions post purchase, raised an $81 million Series B led by . The 4-year-old Utah-based company supporting 4,100 brands and 1,750 merchants was valued at $1.3 billion.

AI healthcare

• , an AI agent built for a patient’s healthcare journey and used by healthcare providers, raised a $120 million Series C led by . The 3-year-old San Francisco-based company was valued at $1.2 billion.

Transportation

• Munich-based , a car subscription platform operating in Germany and partnering with 25 brands, raised a $113 million Series D led by . The 7-year-old company was valued at $1.1 billion.

Related ������Ƶ unicorn lists:

• (1,822)
• (637)
• (213)
• (190)
• (118)
• (102)
• (935)
• (539)
• (248)
• (39)
• (488)

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• AI Services And Robotics Lead Diverse Crop Of 29 New May Unicorns As SpaceX, Anthropic And OpenAI Line Up Blockbuster Exits

Methodology

The ������Ƶ ������Ƶ is a curated list that includes private unicorn companies with post-money valuations of $1 billion or more and is based on ������Ƶ data. New companies are as they reach the $1 billion valuation mark as part of a funding round.

The unicorn board does not reflect internal company valuations — such as those set via a 409a process for employee stock options — as these differ from, and are more likely to be lower than, a priced funding round. We also do not adjust valuations based on investor writedowns, which change quarterly, as different investors will not value the same company consistently within the same quarter.

Funding to unicorn companies includes all private financings to companies that are tagged as unicorns, as well as those that have since graduated to .

Exits analyzed here only include the first time a company exits.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. ������Ƶ converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to ������Ƶ long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

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This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out last week’s biggest funding deal roundup here.

It was not a holiday week on the funding front, as a raft of largely AI-focused companies closed big rounds. The largest of these was a $1.5 billion financing to enterprise AI startup and a Series D for meal and delivery provider . The week also included some big financings for enterprise tech, food delivery, drones and construction automation.

1. , $1.5B, enterprise AI tools: Fireworks AI, a developer of tools for enterprises to turn “general-purpose models into specialized intelligence trained on their own data,” raised $1.505 billion in Series D funding. , and led the financing, which set a $17.5 billion valuation for the San Mateo, California-based company.

2. , $650M, meals and delivery: Wonder, an operator of kitchens and meal delivery services, closed on $650 million in Series D funding at a $9 billion pre-money valuation. Capital will go in part toward expanding operations for the New York-based company, which currently has 140 locations.

3. , $400M, life sciences AI: AI drug discovery startup Chai Discovery secured $400 million in Series C funding at a $3.8 billion valuation. led the financing, investing alongside , , and others.

4. , $300M, robots: Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Walden Robotics, a startup building general-purpose robots for work in manufacturing and logistics, launched out of stealth with $300 million in funding. and led the round, which values the company at $1.1 billion.

5. , $125M, drones: Seattle-based Brinc, a developer of drones for use in public safety and emergency operations, raised $125 million in fresh funding. led the financing, with participation from , and founder and CEO .

6. (tied) , $100M, construction automation: Austin-based TerraFirma, a developer of AI-enabled software and autonomous robotics technology for the construction industry, landed $100 million in new funding, bringing total investment to date to $115 million.

6. (tied) , $100M, enterprise AI: Spectro Cloud, a provider of AI infrastructure management software, said it raised more than $100 million in a Series D round led by . The financing brings total capital raised by San Jose-based Spectro Cloud to $260 million.

8. , $80M, defense tech: Singularity, a startup focused on developing air defense technology, emerged from stealth with $80 million in Series A funding. and 1��led the financing, which set a $400 million valuation for the Los Angeles-based company.

9. (tied) , $70M, fintech: San-Francisco-based fintech startup Flex, a private banking platform for high-net-worth business owners, raised $70 million in a Series B1 financing led by . The round follows the company’s $60 million Series B in December.

9. (tied) , $70M, AI and policy: State Affairs, an AI platform for policy and regulation, secured $70 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures and .

Methodology

We tracked the largest announced rounds in the ������Ƶ database that were raised by U.S.-based companies for the period of July 11-17. Although most announced rounds are represented in the database, there could be a small time lag as some rounds are reported late in the week.

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For this matchup, “¡Gooooooooool!” is really the only acceptable way to announce a new score. And if you can make that a good 21 seconds in one breath, all the better.

Here at ������Ƶ News, meanwhile, we’ve been prepping for the final in a less vocally demanding but much more data-intense manner. Since both contenders are far more famous for soccer than accomplishments in the startup realm, we figured a small step to rectify that was in order.

To do this, we put together a snapshot of recent startup funding tallies and trends for both Spain and Argentina. As you’ll see, neither accounts for a particularly large share of global or even regional investment. Both however, have an intriguing pipeline of recently funded companies.

Argentina

We’ll start with our second World Cup-related profile of Argentina. After it won the final in 2022, we wrote a venture funding-themed story calling the country’s startup scene “small, scrappy and sometimes very successful.”

Four years later, that description still holds. Argentinian startups typically pull in a few hundred million dollars in venture funding annually. Investment is, however, lower than for Brazil and Mexico, the two most populous Latin American nations, which commonly lead in funding.

Argentina’s startup ecosystem has also delivered some big hits over the years. The most famous Argentine-founded internet company — online marketplace �� — commands a market cap around $94 billion on . (It’s currently headquartered in Uruguay but traces its roots to a Buenos Aires garage.)

More recently, Buenos Aires-based fintech has been making waves in the regional startup scene. It’s raised $1.1 billion in known funding to date, including a $195 million March financing.

Others that have raised good-sized rounds this year are also in the fintech space, including:

• , a payments infrastructure startup, closed on a $55 million Series C round co-led by and .
• , a provider of payments and collections infrastructure, secured $27 million in Series B funding in February.

So far, 2026 is shaping up as a strong year for funding, with investment already ahead of last year’s total. Funding tends to fluctuate quite a bit from year to year as the presence or absence of a single large round or two can heavily skew the totals.

Spain

Oddsmakers say Spain is the favorite going into the final. However, it’s well known that often the underdog also prevails. That was the lesson from Spain’s 2:0 defeat of favorite France this week.

But while it may have prevailed over France in soccer, Spain continues to lag in venture funding. So far in 2026, Spanish startups have raised less than $2 billion in funding across stages, which is roughly one-third France’s total for the same period.

While not large, Spain’s funded startup pipeline is not lacking in pizazz. Take this year’s largest funding recipient — — which closed a $206 million Series C in March. Its anything-but-modest mission is to be a “global space transportation service provider to support cargo and human spaceflight missions to the Moon and Mars.”

Other standouts among the bigger rounds this year include:

• , an AI-enabled HR and payroll platform, scooped up $150 million in Series D funding at a $2.5 billion valuation in June. To date, the Barcelona-based company has raised over $350 million in equity funding.
• ��, a Madrid startup focused on infrastructure for near space, space tourism and aerospace data, closed on $140 million in Series D funding in May.
• , a Madrid-based developer of AI tools for analyzing geospatial data, picked up $130 million in Series B funding in April.

Overall funding to Spanish startups is also trending higher, with 2026 on track for a year-over-year gain. For the past few years, annual Spanish startup funding has ranged between $1.8 billion and $2.8 billion, as charted below.

Rooting for the underdog

While both Spain and Argentina have a long track record of soccer success, a case could be made that both are underdogs in the startup space. It’s a familiar situation for secondary hubs in the current AI-driven investment cycle. Capital has been concentrating even more heavily in Silicon Valley and other leading venture hubs.

Given all the follow-on effects a successful startup can have on its region, it’d be encouraging to see investors spreading their bets more broadly across a wider geography. Spain and Argentina have already proven they have what it takes to prevail in one very competitive arena. Given the capital and opportunity, there’s no reason to doubt their abilities in the venture-backed startup game either.

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The purported deal, which has been rumored for months, is notable not just for its scale — it would be one of the largest acquisitions of a technology company in recent years — but also for its highly unusual nature. Privately held startups typically lack the cash, publicly traded shares and debt capacity to acquire their publicly listed brethren.

Of course, Stripe is not just any privately held company. The fintech startup was, until just a few short years ago, the highest valued startup based in the U.S., before being eclipsed on that metric by AI labs and . In February, the company announced it had inked deals with investors to provide liquidity to current and former employees through a tender offer at a $159 billion valuation, which still ranks it as the fourth most valuable startup in the world.

With substantial private capital — it has raised some $10.4 billion since inception, —��Stripe has long been one of the most acquisitive venture-backed startups. It has made since its 2010 inception, according to ������Ƶ data. Only three have disclosed prices: stablecoin platform at $1.1 billion (2025), usage-based billing software startup at $1 billion (2026), and Nigerian payments startup at $200 million (2020).

Stripe’s M&A pace has also accelerated sharply since 2020, ������Ƶ data shows, with 13 of its 21 acquisitions announced since then.

Its recent strategy appears to be focused on stablecoins and crypto infrastructure — Bridge, , and —��as well as on billing and money movement through Metronome, payment processing startup and .

If the plan to buy PayPal does go through, it will most certainly make Stripe an even more formidable player in the crowded payments space.

It would also rank as one of the largest acquisitions of a U.S. tech company, public or private, of the past five years, according to ������Ƶ data, trailing only a handful of larger deals including $61 billion purchase of in 2022 and ’s acquisition of AI coding platform Cursor and its parent, , for $60 billion last month.

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led the round, which included participation from , , , , and others.

Founded in 2020, New York-based Capchase initially made a name for itself by providing revenue-based financing for SaaS companies. However, by late 2022, the company began to evolve into its current iteration: a vendor-financing technology platform. Capchase embeds itself directly into the sales workflows of companies such as original equipment manufacturers, software vendors and cybersecurity providers.

It has entirely discontinued its revenue-based financing, and instead now focuses on B2B buy now, pay later tools that help software and hardware vendors offer flexible payment terms while getting paid upfront.

The concept addresses a longstanding friction point in enterprise sales: vendors want cash immediately, while buyers want to preserve capital. Rather than forcing a buyer to pay $1 million upfront in 30 days, Capchase allows a sales rep to offer more flexible terms — say, $15,000 per month for up to five years. When the deal is signed, Capchase pays the vendor the full amount upfront, net of a financing fee.

“We started to see that there was a very big pull in the market,” , co-founder and CEO of Capchase, said in an interview. “We saw that sales cycles were expanding, CAC was going up, and all of this was driven by the high interest rates. Buyers wanted to pay as late as possible and pay installments.”

He added: “We shipped a product quickly to solve that need, and we started to get very strong market pull to the point that that ended up eclipsing the other product lines, and we decided to focus everything there.”

Displacing a legacy market with AI

The pivot has unlocked impressive growth. Capchase says it has a 400% growth rate over the past 12 months and forecasts another 200% growth in the upcoming year. Its workforce has scaled alongside this momentum, expanding to 75 employees, up from 50 a year ago.

While legacy banks, independent financing firms and captive financing arms have dominated the $1.3 trillion equipment financing market for decades, Capchase says it differentiates itself by replacing 1980s-era workflows with real-time automation.

Traditional financing approvals often require an email-driven back-and-forth that can take four to 17 days, according to Fernandez. Capchase claims to compress that timeline into seconds.

Capchase uses artificial intelligence and machine learning agents across its platform. For example, an “order generation agent” parses uploaded quotes or purchase orders to create flexible payment links in under 60 seconds — down from a manual process that typically took eight hours — according to Fernandez. As another example, an AI email agent automatically handles multiparty coordination between vendors, resellers and buyers, all without human intervention.

“What makes us different is that we are both the lender and the technology. And AI is what makes the combination work at the speed enterprise tech sales demands,” Fernandez told ������Ƶ News in an interview. “We built the credit decisioning engines that allow us to look at all the data these other players look at as well, but we were able to do it and infer it in just seconds.”

Moving upmarket and expanding globally

The new capital will primarily support Capchase’s rapid transition into the enterprise space.

“In the past 24 months, we went from serving vendors in the tens of millions of revenue to in the last 12 months in the hundreds of millions in revenue, and now in the multiple billions of revenue,” Fernandez said.

The startup’s platform now underwrites more stable, established borrowers. The average buyer utilizing Capchase has roughly $80 million in annual revenue, has been operating for over 20 years, and is profitable, he added. This profile has allowed Capchase to maintain a highly controlled risk environment and what he described as a “spectacular” default rate.

Capchase currently supports hundreds of tech vendors and tens of thousands of buyers. Its customer roster features enterprise tech giants, public cybersecurity firms and massive distributors, including , , , and .

Though Capchase keeps its specific financials, valuation and cumulative funding figures confidential, Fernandez confirmed that the latest capital injection represents a valuation step up from its 2021 $80 million Series B round. At the time of that raise, the company had raised more than $400 million in equity and debt.

Looking ahead, Capchase will use its fresh capital to scale beyond its core markets in North America — the U.S. and Canada — and Europe, including the U.K., Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, the Nordics and Spain. Driven by direct demand from its enterprise partners, the company is officially entering the Australian market this year.

Reducing friction with flexible terms

, co-founder and managing partner of 01 Advisors, said he was drawn to Capchase primarily because of how AI has helped it disrupt traditional vendor financing.

Incumbents possessed plenty of capital but “have never been forced to build real technology because their customers had nowhere else to go,” he wrote via email.

AI fundamentally shifts this dynamic, allowing Capchase to “underwrite a buyer and create accurate docs in 30 seconds,” he said.

This solution hits close to home for Bain, who previously ran the sales team at and says he intimately understands the friction Capchase aims to eliminate. In traditional enterprise sales, momentum frequently stalls when a ready-to-buy customer hits a roadblock over payment terms, forcing sales leaders to either “discount to close, wait for the next budget cycle, or spend weeks negotiating.”

Those outcomes drain margin or time. Capchase completely removes that friction, Bain said, by offering instant approvals and flexible terms.

Fintech startups, particularly those that apply AI to traditionally manual or burdensome processes, have benefited from increased investment in recent quarters. Global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $53.8 billion in 2025, per ������Ƶ . That’s a more than 29% increase from 2024’s total of $41.6 billion raised.

Related ������Ƶ query:

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• Fintech Startups Globally Raise More Money In Far Fewer Deals In Q1 2026
• Exclusive: Capchase Raises $80M Series B To Give Startups Alternatives To Venture

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At least not these days. The space and AI pioneer posted a net loss of $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up more than 700% from a year ago. Revenue, meanwhile, totaled $4.69 billion in Q1, up 15% from a year ago.

As a public company, SpaceX is reportedly seeking a valuation of around $1.5 trillion or more, . It’s aiming to raise up to $80 billion or more in the offering, which would make it the largest IPO in history.

At its target valuation, SpaceX would join a rarified club of just seven U.S. public technology companies with market caps of $1.5 trillion or more. Of those, just five have crossed the $2 trillion mark.

Of course, those companies took time to grow into their 13-digit valuations. But at some point, they too made their first public IPO filings. And they too had revenue.

The similarities end there. For a sense of how SpaceX compares at IPO time to other members of the trillion-plus-club, we took a look at their original S-1s from the 1980s and onward. Here’s what their numbers looked like just before their public market debuts:

: Today, the Silicon Valley chip designer is a $5.3 trillion market cap company. Anyone who invested in its 1999 IPO, needless to say, has done extraordinarily well.

At the time of its market debut, of course, such a trajectory was not obvious. Still, it looked like a solid bet. The company, which then focused on designing 3D graphics processors for the PC market, had $93 million in revenue for the three reported quarters prior to its IPO, growing severalfold year over year. Over the same period, it posted a modest $3.5 million loss.

: Google was already the dominant player in online search when it went public in 2004, with impressive financials to boot. Revenue for the first half of that year totaled $1.35 billion, more than doubling in a year, paired with a $326 million profit.

While that was impressive, so is Google’s ongoing growth. Currently, its market cap is $4.7 trillion and it posts more than $400 billion in annual revenue, with massive profits as well.

: The iconic smartphone and computing giant knows a thing or two about longevity. Apple turned 50 last month, and it went public over 45 years ago, in 1980.

It was an impressive and attention-getting offering for the time, with $118 million in sales and nearly $12 million in profit. It helped that Apple was already a prominent consumer brand at the time due to its popular home computers. These days, its market cap hovers around $4.5 trillion.

: Microsoft went public in 1986, so it’s had some 40 years to grow into its current $3.1 trillion valuation. But even back in the era of big hair and floppy disks, the software giant’s IPO prospectus showed clear signs this would be no ordinary market entrant.

In the year before its IPO, Microsoft had revenue of $140 million and net income of $24 million. That income figure, however, includes stepped-up spending on marketing and R&D. Without those expenses, profit margins looked astoundingly high for a time before software business models were status quo.

: At the time of its public offering in 1997, Amazon was known as an online bookseller, branding itself as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” All the other stuff came later.

Still, it was a compelling offering at the time, with Amazon growing annual sales from zilch to around $16 million in just two-and-half years after its inception. It pitched losses as part of its growth strategy, which called for investing heavily in marketing and promotion, site development and operating infrastructure.

Needless to say, things worked out well, with Amazon currently valued at more than $2.8 trillion.

SpaceX is not like the others

If we look at the most valuable public tech companies, a few commonalities about their earlier days stand out. All went public relatively early in their operating histories and debuted with sharply growing revenue and either profits or losses in the single-digit millions.

SpaceX, founded in 2002, looks by comparison like an oldster for a company on the cusp of a public market debut. It’s also worth pointing out that Google, founded in 1998, is only four years older than SpaceX. That means, it’s had 28 years to grow into becoming a company with over $400 billion in revenue over the past 12 months and $138 billion in operating income.

SpaceX, by contrast, has had 24 years to grow into becoming a company that loses $4.3 billion in a single quarter.

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When I was a child growing up in Japan, Dragon Ball was “contraband.” My parents were unhappy about me reading manga for hours every day. Teachers confiscated manga magazines at school. But I was fascinated by a universe created from the pure imagination of a single person that went on to shape the aesthetic consciousness of more humans than almost any artist of the twentieth century.

Japan didn’t build Dragon Ball. Akira Toriyama did.

From One Piece, Slam Dunk and Hello Kitty characters to , and , each traces back to a singular, obsessive individual who looked, by Japanese social standards, like a weird outcast.

The country globally perceived as the ultimate collectivist society made its greatest contributions to the world through lone visionaries building what no committee would have approved.

What makes this pattern remarkable is what accumulates underneath it. Each obsessive builder, over decades, pulled behind them layers of precision craft, knowledge and discipline that no bureaucracy could have planned.

Japan’s extraordinary concentration of underleveraged assets, from precision manufacturing expertise, materials science technology, longevity and gastronomical research to a generational cultural content library, is the sediment left by people society once called misfits.

The vault is opening

The global anime market was only 30 years ago and to hit around $88.5 billion by 2033, growing annually at more than 9%. Overseas anime revenue and accounting for 56% of total sales — confirming that international markets now outweigh Japan’s domestic earnings.

Sources: AJA Industry Reports, Grand View Research, Fortune Business Insights.

has disclosed that more than 50% of its 300 million global members watch anime. Viewership on the platform has tripled over five years, with anime content watched more than 1 billion times in 2024 alone. Naruto, a manga serialization that began in 1999, logged 330 million hours watched on Netflix in the second half of 2024 alone. Out of the top 10 global franchises, five are Japan-originated.

That is critical social infrastructure.

Note: Some other rankings instead have Mario, Harry Potter and/or Shōnen Jump, but generally Japan-originated IP accounts for half.

The convergence nobody is pricing

At the same time, there is a louder conversation happening in Japan.

The nation is rearming. Its defense budget has nearly doubled in three years, exceeding for the first time the symbolic 2% of GDP threshold. Under a five-year Defense Buildup Program through 2027, Japan has committed ¥43 trillion (~$275 billion) to defense-related spending.

Globally, VC investment in defense-related startups totaled $7.7 billion in 2025, ������Ƶ data shows, a record high.

Most observers treat this as a separate story. To me, it is not.

Japan’s manufacturing edge in silicon wafers, photoresists, specialty ceramics, industrial robots, optics and sensors is the same precision culture that made watches accurate to the second and frames hand-painted with obsessive fidelity. The outcast engineers who spent careers perfecting micron-level tolerances for consumer electronics built capabilities that now happen to matter enormously in a world consuming autonomous, high-precision munitions at industrial scale.

The creative and the industrial share the same genealogy: a Japanese individual, largely ignored, building something to an extreme that no one asked for.

This convergence of Japan’s technological prowess and cultural impact is what makes the country’s opportunity genuinely unusual. IP that a teenager in Jakarta, Riyadh, Paris or Lagos carries emotionally,�� and precision hardware that only a handful of countries on earth can actually produce, originate from the same national psychology.

One crosses geopolitical lines. The other determines them. Japan’s soft infrastructure and hard capability are rooted in the same stubborn, misfit tradition.

Manufacturing advantage is learnable. The history of industrial development is a history of production methods moving across geographies, in the past over decades, increasingly over months. Competitors can close the gap.

What is harder to replicate is the cultural depth. A franchise relationship formed in childhood does not transfer by policy or investment. , built by a man who spent years mapping insects on foot and wanted to share that obsession with other children, now lives inside the emotional architecture of an entire global generation.

The window is real, and it will not stay open for long

Wars are hard and exhausting. People do not stop wanting to be moved, amused and alive. If anything, that appetite sharpens during geopolitical turmoil. The world increasingly demands the safety that precision manufacturing enables and the meaning that great storytelling provides.

Japan offers both, not by strategic design, but because its most consequential builders were, for a long time, left alone to be strange.

The assets exist. The global demand is accelerating. What Japan is missing is the cross-border fluency — legal, cultural and financial — needed to connect them at the speed the moment requires in the age of AI.

The world is finally ready to pay for what remarkable, overlooked individuals in Japan have quietly been building for decades. The question is whether Japan will be ready to let them and if so, how it can capitalize on its valuable assets quickly enough.

is a seasoned investor, serial entrepreneur and attorney with 25 years of experience bridging law and global business. He currently serves as the inaugural managing director of Japan, where he leads one of the world’s most active startup accelerator programs. He also serves as a senior adviser at , a U.S. and Canada-based hardtech venture capital firm, and as a venture partner at , an innovation advisory firm. An active angel investor, he has backed more than 50 startups, including several unicorns, and founded , an international angel network connecting investors across Japan, the United States, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. His track record also includes co-founding three venture-backed startups. Previously, Shirato spent a decade at global law firms across New York, Toronto, Abu Dhabi/Dubai, Singapore and Tokyo, and before that, held strategic roles as a management consultant at and as a trade negotiator at . He holds a law degree from the , an MBA from the and , and a bachelor’s degree in international law and economics from the .

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His company raised a few million in seed, and lifted the curtain, and … crickets. Nothing happened. Businesses didn’t sign up. My friend was confused while prospective clients hesitated. This simply didn’t sit well with them.

Then the founder decided to do something odd. He charged money on top of the original monetization plan. Same product, same value proposition, but now there is a monthly subscription. Almost overnight, new businesses began signing up.

Today, that startup is worth billions.

This highlights a counterintuitive truth in strategy: In real-world markets, free or lower prices don’t always drive demand. Frequently, they achieve the opposite.

Higher prices amplify perceived value

The price-quality heuristic is a cornerstone of behavioral economics. When buyers lack complete transparency, they use price as a shortcut for quality. This is why identical items, from fine wines to electronics, are rated higher when they cost more. In B2B, this effect is amplified: A cybersecurity solution priced far below the market doesn’t look like a bargain; it looks like a risk.

Pricing dictates customer behavior and expectations

Low entry points tend to attract price-sensitive users who optimize for cost over outcomes. These cohorts are often more prone to churn and demand excessive support. Conversely, premium pricing attracts partners who value reliability and performance. Opting for higher pricing means going after clients with a different mindset. Even in strategic advisory, I see premium pricing as a filter for commitment.

Your price defines your competitive landscape

Pricing at the bottom floor frames the company within a commoditized segment where differentiation is minimal. Pricing at a premium forces a higher standard of depth, service and trust. Price defines who you are competing against and how you will be compared to them.

is a strategic adviser to tech companies and investors, specializing in strategy, growth and M&A, a guest contributor to ������Ƶ News, and a seasoned lecturer. Learn more about his advisory services, lectures and courses at . for further insights and discussions.

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This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out last week’s biggest funding deal roundup here.

Busy week, big checks, lots of AI and robotics. That, in ultra-brief synopsis form, characterized the general startup fundraising environment this week. Notably, the two largest global rounds were U.K.-based and Paris-based , which raised $2 billion and $1.03 billion, respectively.

In the U.S., meanwhile, e-commerce platform , AI networking developer and industrial automation startup each picked up $500 million.

1. (tied) , $500M, e-commerce: Quince, an online fashion and home goods retailer with an affordable luxury theme, said it secured $500 million in Series E financing led by . The round sets a $10.1 billion post-money valuation for the 8-year-old, San Francisco-based company.

1. (tied) , $500M, AI infrastructure: AI networking startup Nexthop AI raised $500 million in Series B funding led by , with joining as a major investor alongside other backers. The Santa Clara, California-based company develops switching technology built on open-source operating systems for AI and cloud networking.

1. (tied) , $500M, robotics: spin-out Mind Robotics closed on a $500 million Series A round, co-led by and Andreessen Horowitz. The Palo Alto, California-based company is developing an AI-enabled industrial robotics platform, with a focus on automating industrial and manufacturing tasks at scale.

4. , $450M, robotics: Palo Alto, California-based robotics startup Rhoda AI emerged from stealth with $450 million in Series A funding reportedly led by . The startup trains robots using hundreds of millions of videos to develop intelligent models for operating in complex and changing environments.

5. , $400M, AI software creation: Replit, an agentic AI software creation platform, picked up $400 million in Series D funding at a $9 billion valuation, up from $3 billion just six months ago. led the financing for the Foster City, California-based company, joined by a long list of venture and celebrity investors.

6. (tied) , $200M, AI networking: AI startup Eridu emerged from stealth with over $200 million in a newly announced Series A round led by , , , and . Saratoga, California-based Eridu develops a high-performance network switch for AI data centers.

6. (tied) , $200M, artificial intelligence: Palo Alto, California-based Axiom Math AI, a developer of AI systems that can perform automated verification of computer code, $200 million in Series A funding at a $1.6 billion valuation. led the round, joined by , , and .

8. , $165M, robotics: Sunday, a startup planning a beta launch for a household robot called Memo later this year, raised $165 million in Series B funding. led the financing, which set a $1.15 billion valuation for the Mountain View, California-based company.

9. , $125M, cybersecurity: San Jose, California-based Kai, developer of an agentic AI cybersecurity platform, announced that it secured $125 million in funding led by .

10. , $100M, procurement: Oro Labs, developer of a procurement platform for enterprise customers, raised $100 million in Series C funding. and led the financing, which the company said follows a year of 300% revenue growth.

Global financings

The week’s largest rounds went to ������Ƶ startups.

, $2B, AI infrastructure: Nscale, an AI infrastructure hyperscaler, secured�� $2 billion in Series C funding. and led the financing, which set a $14.6 billion valuation for the London-based company.

, $1.03B, artificial intelligence: Advanced Machine Intelligence, a startup co-founded by computer science pioneer and former AI chief , said it has raised $1.03 billion to develop “world models,” or AI designed to learn from and interact with the physical world. The funding for the Paris-based company represents the largest seed round ever for a ������Ƶ startup.

Methodology

We tracked the largest announced rounds in the ������Ƶ database that were raised by U.S.-based companies for the period of March 7-13. Although most announced rounds are represented in the database, there could be a small time lag as some rounds are reported late in the week.

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