👋 Hey — Egemen here.
I read the headline last week and felt good about the raise I have been planning.
US startups pulled in more than $400 billion in the first half of 2026, past every full year on record.
Then I looked at how many companies that money reached…
Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:
💡 Spotlight: The AI Agent You Can Trust
🧠 Deep-Dive: Nobody counted the deals
🗺️ Method: Win AI Search Without a Big Team
⚾️ Catch: Why user an EOR
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Databricks
💡 Spotlight
The AI Agent You Can Trust
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🧠 Deep-Dive: Nobody counted the deals
The count is absolutely broken. 263 mega-rounds took 81% of all the money, and one company took close to 40% on its own.
19%
New unicorn births fell by more than two thirds in a single quarter, down to a six-quarter low. That is the number I keep going back to. Unicorn formation tells you how many companies got enough capital to grow into something large, and it collapsed during the quarter that set the funding record.
(Source: CB Insights, "State of Venture Q2'26," July 7, 2026. CB Insights reports 81% of funding across 263 mega-rounds and nearly 40% for a single company. The split between that company and the other 262 follows from those two figures.)
PitchBook and the NVCA read the same quarter and landed in the same place. Investment and fundraising both hit records while exits improved, and all of it stayed concentrated in a small group of companies and funds.
My read is that most founders still price their odds off the dollar figure, and the dollar figure describes a few hundred rounds. The base rate underneath it moved the other way.
👉 Before you set a raise date, count the rounds that closed in your stage and sector over the last two quarters instead of the dollars raised. If that count fell, add six months to your runway plan now, while cutting is still your decision and not your investor's.
🗺️ Method
Win AI Search Without a Big Team
92% of VCs use AI to find companies. 58% of buyers start there too. If you're not showing up in AI answers, you're invisible before the conversation even starts. Join HubSpot for Startups, Anthropic, and Marketing Against the Grain on July 16 (11am ET) for a live AEO teardown. Real startup. Real recs. Register and unlock the free Startup Visibility Bundle.
⚾️ Catch
What is an EOR—and why are companies using it?
Opening entities in every country can be slow, expensive, and hard to scale.
That's why more companies are using EOR to hire globally faster.
See how Oyster helps teams hire, pay, and support talent in 180+ countries while staying compliant along the way.
☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Databricks
Databricks has announced a massive strategic funding round led by Coatue, valuing the data and AI giant at a staggering $188 billion.
Databricks provides a unified data and artificial intelligence platform that combines the best elements of data lakes and data warehouses into an open "lakehouse" architecture.
Their software enables large enterprises to process massive datasets, run complex analytics, and securely govern multi-model AI systems from a centralized control plane.