Biggest US funding rounds, week ending 10th July
Updated July 2026. By Remy Beaumont.
Key takeaways
US funding rounds this week totalled at least $3.04bn across the ten biggest disclosed deals, from a pair of $1bn megarounds to a $67.4m biotech raise.
The headline deal was Keyfactor's $1bn+ strategic growth investment led by Summit Partners, tied for the week's largest with SambaNova's $1bn Series F first close.
The biggest surprise: two unrelated companies landed identical $1bn cheques in the same seven day window, one from a private equity growth investor and one from an AI-focused crossover fund.
The leading sector was AI and trust infrastructure, with quantum computing and hard tech close behind.
What did the US funding week look like?
US funding rounds this week were dominated by scale rather than novelty. Ten disclosed deals worth at least $3.04bn ran from a pair of $1bn megarounds down to a $67.4m biotech Series D, and AI claimed five of the ten largest, or 50% by count, according to Crunchbase data. What stood out was how much of the money went to companies solving trust and physical constraints rather than building new AI applications: machine identity, post-quantum cryptography, quantum hardware, geothermal drilling and hypersonic propulsion all drew nine figure cheques in the same week. That is a meaningfully different mix from the previous week, when a single energy infrastructure deal dwarfed everything else on the board.
Which was the biggest round this week?
Independence, Ohio-based Keyfactor took the week's largest US funding round: a $1bn+ strategic growth investment led by Summit Partners, with Insight Partners and Sixth Street Growth also participating, announced on 6th July. Keyfactor provides machine identity and certificate lifecycle management software, and the announcement was built around a single, deliberately dual-barrelled headline: "Expand Leadership in Securing the AI and Post-Quantum Enterprise." That framing fused two separate enterprise anxieties, AI trust and the coming break in classical cryptography, into one funding story, which is why the release landed simultaneously on PR Newswire, Summit Partners' own site and a syndicated law firm write-up from Kirkland & Ellis, giving it three distribution channels instead of one.
The structure of the deal mattered as much as the size. This was a private equity round, not a venture round, which let Keyfactor lean on Summit Partners' growth equity reputation to signal maturity and enterprise readiness to the CISOs it sells into, rather than positioning itself as another early stage AI bet. The company has now raised $1.21bn to date, meaning this single round accounts for the overwhelming majority of its total capital raised, a detail worth noting for founders weighing a first large institutional cheque against a longer runway of smaller rounds.
The other big rounds this week
Five more US funding rounds this week cleared $120m, spanning AI infrastructure, quantum computing and clean energy:
SambaNova tied Keyfactor at $1bn, announced 8th July as the first close of a Series F led by General Atlantic at an $11bn post-money valuation. The Palo Alto AI chip maker paired the raise with news of JPMorgan Chase as an inference customer, giving the "long-awaited" round (as Crunchbase called it) a concrete commercial proof point rather than just a valuation headline.
Oratomic raised a $300m Series A on the week, co-led by Arch Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures and Spark Capital. The South Pasadena quantum computing startup is building neutral-atom hardware, and 16 investors joined the round including Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt.
Quaise Energy raised a $134m Series B led by Prelude Ventures. The Houston company is developing millimetre-wave drilling technology to unlock deep geothermal power, taking its total raised to $225m.
Prime Intellect raised a $130m Series A led by Radical Ventures. The San Francisco startup, building an open platform for training AI models across distributed compute, drew a syndicate stacked with operator angels including Box CEO Aaron Levie, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and OpenAI co-founder John Schulman.
Norm AI raised a $120m Series C led by Khosla Ventures at a reported $1.2bn valuation, minting the New York regulatory compliance startup as a new unicorn. Backers included Bain Capital Ventures, Coatue and Blackstone chairman Hamilton James.
Where is US capital flowing?
Across this week's US funding rounds, the clearest pattern is capital moving from AI applications into AI trust and AI physical infrastructure. Keyfactor and, in a different way, Oratomic are both selling protection against a cryptographic future that has not fully arrived yet, and both raised nine figure sums on that thesis. SambaNova and Prime Intellect are chasing the compute side of the same story, building the chips and the distributed platforms that train and run frontier models. Then there is a smaller but consistent thread of hard tech that has nothing to do with software at all: Quaise Energy's geothermal drilling and Venus Aerospace's hypersonic propulsion (below) both drew growth stage cheques this week, suggesting investors are increasingly comfortable funding multi-year physical R&D alongside faster moving AI bets.
Notable US launches this week
Three launches stood out alongside the week's funding news:
Arkenstone Defense exited stealth on 7th July with a $35m seed round led by J2 Ventures, building compliance and operations tooling to help commercial technology companies sell to the US government, a launch that landed the same week as several other rounds with a defense or security angle.
GPT-5.6 went publicly available on 9th July across ChatGPT, Codex and the OpenAI API, after the US government requested a gated safety review specifically because of the model's cybersecurity capability, a review that echoes the same AI-trust anxieties Keyfactor built its funding announcement around.
Muse Image, Meta's most advanced in-house image generation model from Superintelligence Labs, launched this week with an early preview of Muse Video, integrating into Meta AI, Instagram Stories and WhatsApp.
What should founders raising soon do this week?
Four patterns from this week's US funding rounds are worth acting on. First, if you are enterprise and late stage, a private equity growth investor can carry more credibility with security or compliance buyers than another venture round, as Keyfactor's Summit Partners deal shows. Second, pair any large raise with a named customer or partner, not just a valuation; SambaNova's JPMorgan Chase mention did more for the story than the $11bn figure alone. Third, a stacked syndicate of operator angels, as Prime Intellect assembled, still reads as a strong credibility signal in crowded AI infrastructure categories. Fourth, if you sell into government or regulated buyers, lead with compliance and operations, not the underlying model, the way both Arkenstone Defense and Norm AI did this week.
The rest of the week's top rounds
Four more rounds rounded out the week's top ten. Gauntlet, a New York crypto infrastructure startup, raised a reported $125m Series B from sole investor SBI Group. Venus Aerospace, based in Houston, raised a $91m Series B led by Mercury to advance hypersonic propulsion technology, taking its total to $197m. EDX Markets, the Hoboken, New Jersey institutional crypto exchange backed by Citadel Securities and Fidelity Digital Assets, raised $76m, with SBI Group backing its second large crypto deal of the week. Fore Biotherapeutics, a Philadelphia precision oncology company, closed a $67.4m Series D led by SR One to advance its rare cancer mutation pipeline. For a longer view of the month's biggest deals, see this month's biggest US funding rounds.
Frequently asked questions
What was the biggest US funding round this week?
Two rounds tied for the largest of this week's US funding rounds at $1bn each: Keyfactor's strategic growth investment led by Summit Partners, and SambaNova's Series F first close led by General Atlantic.
How much did US startups raise this week?
The ten biggest disclosed US funding rounds this week totalled at least $3.04bn, led by Keyfactor and SambaNova.
Which sector attracted the most funding this week?
AI infrastructure and trust or security infrastructure led the week, with quantum computing and hard tech close behind among this week's US funding rounds.
Why did two companies both raise exactly $1bn in the same week?
It is a coincidence of timing rather than a coordinated event, but it shows that growth stage AI-adjacent infrastructure companies are now routinely clearing billion dollar cheques from both venture and private equity investors.
What notable US startups launched this week?
Defense compliance startup Arkenstone Defense exited stealth with a $35m seed round, OpenAI publicly released GPT-5.6 after a government cybersecurity review, and Meta launched its Muse Image model.
What should founders take from this week's rounds?
Consider private equity growth investors for enterprise and security plays, pair any large raise with a named customer, build a credible angel syndicate in crowded categories, and lead compliance first when selling to government or regulated buyers.
For more on how these stories get built to travel, see Ignita's playbook for getting European startups covered in US press and last week's US funding round teardown, where a utility beat every VC to the punch.
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