AI Agent Startup Funding: August and September 2026 (Q3 Tracker)

Last updated: September 28, 2026. July and August are closed; September is open and checked weekly, and this pass added seven rounds to it, two of them backdated to September 15. The Q2 2026 edition has been folded into this page; see the Q2 recap below for the April to June picture.

This is the running record of every disclosed AI agent startup funding round in Q3 2026, organized by month, because that is how the money actually lands and how people actually search for it. Every round listed here carries a named source. Where a widely shared number turned out to be a valuation dressed up as a raise, or a round that never closed, we say so instead of repeating it.

Key takeaways

• Cognition closed on September 8 at over $2 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, both new investors, at a $48 billion valuation. Run rate went from $492 million in May to roughly $900 million. This page held the reported round out of its totals for four weeks because talks are not a round. It is in now, counted at a $2 billion floor.
• Temporal Technologies raised $550 million on September 14, a Series E co-led by Lightspeed with Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Tiger Global, at a $12.55 billion valuation. It is the quarter's second-largest round, and what it sells is durable execution: the machinery that lets an agent run for days or weeks and survive a crash mid-task. Revenue run rate is past $250 million, up more than 200 percent year over year.
• Factory raised $200 million on September 15 at a $5 billion valuation, more than triple the $1.5 billion it carried in April, taking total funding past $400 million. Nine firms are named, including Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners and NEA, and no lead. It sells coding agents that run across code review, security, testing, documentation and incident response. It is the quarter's fourth-largest round, and this page missed it for thirteen days across two weekly passes.
• Q3 stands at 56 disclosed rounds and about $5.25 billion through September 25: sixteen in July ($851 million), seventeen in August ($1.19 billion), twenty-three in September so far ($3.21 billion). Median cheque across the quarter: $30 million, unmoved since July. Without Cognition: 55 rounds, $3.25 billion.
• Every correction this page has ever made has been an under-count, five of them now. July did not end at thirteen, it ended at sixteen. August did not end at seven, it ended at seventeen. September's first fifteen days did not end at nine, or at fourteen, but at sixteen. Four of those corrections are announcement lag, which is structural rather than careless: a round closes before anyone writes it up. The fifth is not. Factory's $200 million was reported the day it was announced and this page walked past it twice, which is a sweep that was too narrow.
• Agent governance still leads by deal count, but added nothing this week. Eleven of the thirty-three rounds added for August and September sell control over agents rather than agents themselves, a third of them, down from 42 percent a week ago. None of the seven rounds added on September 28 sell governance, and five sell agents doing a named job: code review, mortgage calls, enterprise workflows, CRM, team messaging. First crack in a three-month pattern, not yet a reversal.
• Seed is where the infrastructure bets sit. Sixteen of the thirty-three rounds added for August and September are seed or pre-seed, and the median cheque among the seven added this week is $21 million.
• Israel is over-indexed: six of the thirty-three rounds added for August and September (Alice, Cymphony, DataAgent, Arrakis Security, Xpander, Keewano), and four of the six sell agent security or agent governance.
• July closed at 16 rounds worth $851 million, led by Prime Intellect's $130 million Series A. Five of those rounds, $338 million between July 18 and 29, fund agent governance.
• The backdrop is a record: Crunchbase counted $510 billion in global venture funding in H1 2026, with more than 70 percent of Q2 capital going to AI, and OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbing 43 percent of all H1 funding.
• What gets funded in agents: infrastructure (payments, training stacks, search built for agents), the control layer, and vertical agents with named customers. Thin wrappers do not.
• Gravity remains bootstrapped on purpose; the counter-trend is alive and well.

The headline numbers

Quarter to date, through September 25: 56 disclosed AI agent rounds for $5.25 billion. Sixteen in July at $851 million, seventeen in August at $1.19 billion, twenty-three in September so far at $3.21 billion. Cognition closed on September 8 at what its own announcement calls over $2 billion, and since no exact figure has been published this page enters it at $2,000 million. That is a floor, not a measurement, so every total here is too low by an unknown amount and only in that direction. Temporal Technologies closed $550 million on September 14, which is the second-largest round of the quarter and the largest with a published figure. Factory's $200 million on September 15 is the fourth-largest, behind Instinct's $250 million in August.

Strip Cognition out and the quarter is legible again: 55 rounds, $3.25 billion, median cheque $30 million, average $59.0 million. The monthly averages run $53.2 million in July, $69.8 million in August, and $55.0 million across September so far. Watch what that September average has done across three consecutive weekly passes: $20.9 million, then $53.6 million, then $55.0 million. Nothing about the market changed between those readings. The reporting did. That is the honest lesson about monthly averages in a market this concentrated, and the reason this page leads with deal count and median instead. The median has sat at $30 million since July, through five corrections and a tripling of the September total. Deal count is the steadier signal and it is rising hard: 0.52 disclosed rounds a day in July, 0.55 in August, 0.92 through September 25. That is nearly double July's pace.

July now splits into four acts rather than three, because a re-check found three rounds the earlier passes missed. The holiday-shortened first week produced three small rounds worth $37 million. From July 8 the pace changed: six rounds worth $458 million, including three nine-figure cheques. Then July 28 and 29 produced six more rounds worth $343 million, five of which fund the layer that governs what agents are permitted to do. Smallest.ai closed the month alone on July 31 at $13 million. July's biggest was Prime Intellect at $130 million. The context it sits inside is the real story. Per Crunchbase, global venture funding hit a record $510 billion in the first half of 2026 ($305 billion in Q1, $205 billion in Q2), already ahead of 2025's full-year total of $440 billion. More than 70 percent of Q2 capital went to AI companies, up from just under half a year earlier, and OpenAI and Anthropic together took $217 billion, which is 43 percent of everything raised in the half.

Read those two facts together and the shape of the market is clear: the AI funding total is gigantic, and almost all of it pools at the model layer. Agent startups compete for the remainder, and within that remainder the money is picking specific layers, which the category section below breaks down. For how this compares with last quarter's pattern, the Q2 recap below documents the same top-heavy structure at smaller scale.

July 2026 rounds

Every disclosed AI agent round announced in July 2026, with amount, stage, lead, and source, in date order. Sixteen rounds, $851 million. Three of those rounds were added on 15 September after a re-check of the month: Onyx Security ($113 million, July 29), Oak ($60 million, July 15), and Mate Security ($35 million, July 28). July has now been under-counted twice by this page, and both times the misses sat in the same place. Three patterns are worth naming before the list. First, the money went to infrastructure for agents rather than to agents themselves: the largest rounds sell picks and shovels, not finished agents. Second, agent payments became a category in its own right, with two separately funded startups building rails so agents can move money without a human clicking approve. Third, and this is what the corrected back half shows, agent governance drew five rounds worth $338 million between July 18 and 29 from investors betting that the control layer matters as much as the agents.

Prime Intellect: $130 million Series A (July 8)

The month's largest agent round, and the clearest statement of where investors think the value sits. Prime Intellect sells the stack enterprises need to build and train their own agents rather than rent someone else's: compute, reinforcement learning frameworks, and evaluation tooling, offered as modular pieces. Radical Ventures led at a $1 billion valuation, with Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and Iconiq participating, alongside an unusually operator-heavy angel list including Aravind Srinivas of Perplexity, Aaron Levie of Box, Winston Weinberg of Harvey, Jeff Wang of Cognition, and Brendan Foody of Mercor. The company reports a $100 million annualized revenue run rate with Ramp and Zapier among its customers, which is the detail that separates this from a story round. Reported by TechCrunch.

Lyzr: $100 million Series B (July 9)

Lyzr builds AI agents for enterprises, and it ran its own Series B with one. Its agent, SivaClaw, fielded questions from more than 130 investors, drafted investment memos, and tracked which slides investors lingered on; the company says the process drew $400 million of investor interest without the founders taking traditional in-person meetings. The round closed at roughly a $500 million valuation. Treat the fundraise-by-agent framing as marketing that happened to work, but note what it demonstrates: a real, high-stakes, multi-week workflow run by an agent with a verifiable outcome. That is a more convincing demo than most benchmark scores. Reported by TechCrunch.

Neo Security: $100 million (July 18-24)

The Boston company is building an agentic software control platform for enterprises, which is the governance layer that becomes necessary once agents are actually doing work inside a company. Bessemer Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz co-led. It landed in the same week as Travis Kalanick's $1.7 billion physical-AI round at Atoms, which is a useful reminder of the scale gap between agent software and the categories currently absorbing megadeals. Reported in Crunchbase News's weekly roundup.

Freehand: $75 million Series B (July 29)

The month's largest vertical-agent round, and the strongest evidence yet for the revenue-first thesis. The San Francisco company runs autonomous agents over enterprise supply-chain spend: procurement, supplier workflows, invoice checks, and payment operations, the back-office work that large companies staff with teams. Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners co-led, with Nexus Venture Partners and former US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker participating, taking total funding to $100 million. The customer list is what separates this from a thesis round: Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Cardinal Health, and Dunkin'. Freehand reports recovering 5 to 10 percent of total spend in the categories it touches and cutting procure-to-pay cycle times by more than 70 percent; those are company figures rather than audited results. Reported by Crunchbase News and PYMNTS.

Act Security: $60 million seed and Series A (July 28)

The Tel Aviv company left stealth with two rounds disclosed at once: a $20 million seed led by Team8 and Bessemer Venture Partners, then a $40 million Series A led by Notable Capital. It was founded in 2025 by the team behind Medigate, the healthcare device security company Claroty acquired in January 2022. The problem it names is worth understanding even if you never buy the product: agents inherit the standing cloud permissions of the humans and services that created them, so an agent can reach whatever its borrowed credentials happen to reach, and nobody scoped that on purpose. Act reports that close to 97 percent of cloud access in the environments it audits sits dormant and unused, which is the surface it exists to shrink. Reported by SiliconANGLE, with the round confirmed in the company announcement.

Arrakis: $38 million Series A and seed (July 22)

A seven-month-old London and Paris company emerging from stealth with two rounds disclosed at once: a $30 million Series A led by Blossom Capital and a $7.5 million seed led by Accel, at a $140 million post-money valuation. GFC, MainObject, and Rerail joined, with Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel and OpenAI's head of business products Olivier Godement among the angels. Arrakis is building an AI operating system for industrial companies across aerospace, energy, logistics, and manufacturing. CEO Quintanilla frames the bet as targeting "the 70% running industrial operations" rather than office workers, and the platform is model-agnostic so it can route to cheaper providers per task. Reported by Fortune.

Natural: $30 million Series A (July 20)

The second agent-payments round of the month, after AIsa's seed three weeks earlier. Natural describes itself as an agent orchestration layer that lets agents move and store funds, make autonomous payments, collect money, and transact with humans and other agents, all of which conventional payment rails require a human to authorize. Forerunner led, taking total funding to $40 million, and CEO Kahlil Lalji argues "agentic payments are going to be structurally the most important problem" in the space. The company is explicit about competing with Stripe and plans to support both bank payments and USD-backed stablecoins. Reported by TechCrunch.

Encore AI: $30 million Series A (July 29)

Encore inverts the usual support-agent pitch. Most customer-facing agents are sold on deflection, on reducing how many people ever reach a human. Encore is sold on revenue per interaction: it analyses recorded conversations between a company's own staff and its customers, works out which approaches actually closed or retained business, and trains agents to reproduce them. Team8, Planven, and The Garage led, joined by Lukatz and by several banks and insurers that were customers before they became investors, which is a better signal than most Series A syndicates offer. The Kiryat Ono company was founded in 2022 by CEO Dvir Ginzburg, raised a $3.5 million seed in May 2025, and reports more than 40 enterprise clients. Reported by TechCrunch and Calcalist.

Hush Security: $30 million Series A (July 28)

The second agent-governance round inside the same 24 hours, which is the detail that turns a coincidence into a category. Hush secures what it calls the non-human workforce: secrets, service accounts, machine identities, and AI agents. Its approach is to remove standing access altogether and issue scoped, just-in-time permissions instead, with every action logged and revocable from one place. Akamai joined as a strategic investor alongside existing backers Battery Ventures and YL Ventures, taking total funding to $41 million less than a year after the company left stealth. Founded in 2024 by CEO Micha Rave with the team behind Meta Networks, which Proofpoint acquired in 2019. Reported by Calcalist, with the round confirmed in the company announcement.

LinqAlpha: $22 million Series A (July 2)

LinqAlpha builds AI agents for institutional investors: the agents process filings, transcripts, and news to surface market-moving signals for hedge funds and asset managers, and the company reports more than 70 financial institutions as customers, including Causeway Capital and Schonfeld. The round was anchored by AVP, Atinum Investment, and GFT Ventures with participation from strategic financial institutions, taking total funding to about $28.6 million. Reported by Bloomberg and confirmed in the company announcement.

Smallest.ai: $13 million Series A (July 31)

The month's last round, and one we missed in the first pass at July. Smallest.ai builds voice agents on small, specialised speech models rather than on general large language models, on the argument that the tell in a machine conversation is latency rather than word choice: its architecture listens, reasons, and speaks in parallel instead of in sequence, which is how it aims to survive being interrupted mid-sentence. Seligman Ventures led, with Sierra Ventures and 3one4 Capital participating, taking total funding past $21 million. Note the distinction if you see this round quoted elsewhere: several outlets headline the $21 million total rather than the $13 million raise. Reported by TechCrunch and SiliconANGLE, and confirmed in the company announcement.

Build: $8.5 million seed (July 1)

Build, a British-American company, applies agentic automation to infrastructure development: site sourcing, technical due diligence, power assessment, and early design for data-center and infrastructure projects, deployed on more than 100 projects across 15 countries including work with Tishman Speyer. Index Ventures led, joined by Pebblebed, Puzzle Ventures, and Tiny.vc, with angels including OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar and Blackstone CTO John Stecher. Covered by UKTN and AEC Magazine; note this one ran in trade press rather than the big US outlets, though the details are consistent across several publications.

AIsa: $6.5 million seed (July 3)

AIsa is building the payments layer for the agent economy: a unified transaction API that lets AI agents discover, access, and pay for digital resources with usage-based billing that settles in fiat or stablecoins. The San Francisco company says more than 20,000 agents are registered on its rails. Alibaba and Tribe Capital led, with Draper Associates, Sumitomo Corporation, and Saison Capital participating. Reported by Forbes.

The three July rounds added on 15 September

A re-check of July on 15 September 2026 found three rounds this page had missed, worth $208 million between them. Onyx Security raised a $113 million Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners on July 29 for a central place to see and control every agent that has been handed access to corporate systems. It is the second-largest July round on this page and it sat outside it for six weeks. Oak stepped out of stealth on July 15 with $60 million already raised, building an identity layer for agents; the lead is not confirmed, which is why that cell reads as it does. Mate Security raised a $35 million Series A led by Canaan Partners on July 28 for security operations run by autonomous agents rather than by an on-call rota.

All three sell governance or identity for agents, which is the same category the 1 August correction added three more of. A tracker misses what it is not looking for. The lesson this page took from July is that the control layer generates more rounds than its share of headlines, so it now gets its own sweep each month.

What we excluded, and why

Transparency is the whole value of a tracker, so here is what did not make the list.

• Talp, an AI-personas startup, was widely aggregated as "raising $20 million," but the primary report says the pre-seed closed at a $20 million valuation with the amount undisclosed, so it is out until a raise figure is confirmed.
• ElevenLabs was reported by Bloomberg to be in tender-offer talks at a $22 billion valuation, which is a secondary share sale discussion, not a funding round.
• Crusoe's reported $3 billion raise was still "in talks" as of this writing, and it is AI energy infrastructure rather than agents.
• Together AI's $800 million Series C (July 1, $8.3 billion valuation) is AI cloud infrastructure, not an agent company, so it sits in the backdrop rather than the tracker.
• AegisAI's $36 million Series A (July 23, led by Battery Ventures with Accel and Foundation Capital) is a genuinely agentic product, but it defends against AI-driven spear phishing. It is AI security, not an agent platform, and counting it would let the tracker's definition drift.
• 8090 Solutions' $135 million round led by Salesforce Ventures does build enterprise software with coordinated AI agents, and it appeared in a Crunchbase weekly roundup that spans the quarter boundary. It was announced June 29, which puts it in Q2, not Q3.
• AppZen's $180 million Series D is widely resurfaced in AI agent funding summaries and is a real agentic-finance company, but the round was announced in September 2025. Several aggregators list it as current; it is not.
• Fireworks AI ($1.505 billion Series D), Atoms ($1.7 billion, physical AI), and Etched ($300 million Series C, inference chips) were July's genuine AI megadeals. All three are model, robotics, or silicon plays that agents run on top of, not agent companies.

A note on sourcing, because this month made it matter. Several high-traffic aggregator pages published July 2026 "AI agent funding" totals in the $1.8 billion range, built by sweeping in infrastructure megadeals and, in at least one case, rounds that closed a year earlier at valuations that contradict the companies' own announcements. Their deal counts are now close to ours; their dollar totals are not, and almost the entire gap is Fireworks AI, Atoms, and Etched. Every figure above traces to a named primary outlet and the date given is the announcement date. That is why this tracker's monthly total is roughly a third of what those pages claim.

August 2026 rounds

Seventeen disclosed AI agent rounds in August, worth $1.19 billion. Ten of them were added on 15 September, and they undo the story this page told on 7 September. That update called August closed at seven rounds and $681.5 million, all between August 3 and 12, and it called the back half of the month quiet. The back half was not quiet. Six of the ten additions landed between August 17 and 26, and one of them, Instinct at $250 million, is the largest agent round of the month.

Corrected, August beat July on both counts rather than on cheque size alone: 17 rounds against 16, $1.19 billion against $851 million, 0.55 disclosed rounds a day against 0.52. The average cheque went from $53.2 million in July to $69.8 million in August, a rise of about thirty percent, not the doubling this page reported when it was working from seven rounds.

This section has now been wrong twice, in the same direction. The August 14 version counted five rounds and concluded that capital was "arriving in bigger cheques at fewer companies." The September 7 version counted seven and declared the month finished. Both under-counted, and the second one missed the month's biggest cheque. Counting properly, August produced seven rounds of $85 million or more against July's four, and nine rounds under $30 million against July's four. Big rounds got bigger and more frequent, and small rounds got more numerous at the same time. Why a tracker misses small rounds is obvious. Why this one missed a $250 million Series B is less comfortable: the September 7 sweep covered August 16 to 31 and reported nothing there, so the sweep was wrong rather than the month.

The July question is answered: governance held, and then some. Last month's update asked whether the $190 million that went into agent governance over eleven days was a category or a coincidence. August settled it in forty-eight hours. Zenity raised $125 million on August 3, led by Norwest, for a platform that governs what AI agents are allowed to do inside enterprise systems. The next day Obsidian Security announced $85 million led by Crescent Cove Advisors, crossing into unicorn territory, for securing non-human identities and agents across third-party applications. That is $210 million into the agent control layer in two days. July's governance cluster, once corrected, took $338 million across twelve days, so August's burst is the denser event rather than the larger one. Two companies selling the same thing, funded within a day of each other, is what a category looks like when it stops being speculative.

The other three rounds fund agents that already have customers. HappyRobot took the month's largest cheque at $150 million, led by Prysm Capital and co-led by Eurazeo, with a16z, Base10, and Y Combinator following on. It values the company at $1.2 billion post-money and brings total funding to around $200 million, for agents that handle calls, emails, and documents in logistics and industrial operations. CodeRabbit raised $143 million at a $1.5 billion valuation on August 12, led by Atomico and Smash Capital, and used the announcement to launch a layer that governs and prioritises code changes made by humans and agents alike. Acrab, a Singapore company, added a $130 million Series B on August 6 with continued backing from Vertex Ventures SEA & India and Vertex Growth, building silicon and edge infrastructure to run agents outside the data centre.

The two smaller rounds are both about getting agents into production, not building them. Naïve raised $28.5 million on August 6 in a Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, with Y Combinator, Zetta, and Liquid 2 participating, taking total funding to roughly $32 million. It sells infrastructure that agents run a business on: sandboxes, model routing, a memory layer, and orchestration, with over 30,000 developer customers signed up within months of launch. June emerged from stealth on August 3 with a $20 million pre-seed led by Marc Benioff's Time Ventures, backed by Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz. Its four founders sold their previous company to Salesforce and spent years watching enterprise AI projects stall; June scans a company's existing systems and produces the step-by-step roadmap for deploying an agent into them. The founder's framing is worth quoting because it is the whole thesis of this section: "Building an agent template is the easy part."

The ten August rounds added on 15 September

The largest is the one that changes the month. Instinct, built by Spear Street Technology, raised $250 million on August 26 in a Series B led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. Its product is a personal agent you reach by phone or text: it drafts email, manages a calendar, books travel, and transacts on connected apps. That is a consumer-shaped agent taking the biggest cheque in a month otherwise dominated by enterprise control software. Alice, formerly ActiveFence, took $140 million from Apax Digital on August 25 for testing models and agents against adversarial attacks and enforcing safety policy after deployment. Sapiom raised $35 million led by Dragonfly on August 5 for a platform that ships, runs and scales agents in production.

The rest are infrastructure bets at seed prices. Keenable took $26 million from Accel and Conviction Partners on August 25 to run an independent index of more than 100 billion documents that agents query by API, on the view that search built for people is the wrong shape for a machine. Runable, out of Bengaluru, raised $21 million led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners for agents that build a small business a site and then run its marketing. Arga Labs took $10 million from General Catalyst for digital twins of enterprise software, so an agent can be trained and tested in simulation before it touches the real system. Arrakis Security raised $8 million from Hetz Ventures on August 2 to find every agent in an organisation and flag the ones behaving unlike themselves. Note the name: this is an Israeli company, and it is not the London and Paris Arrakis that raised $38 million in July. Both stay on this page under their own dates.

Xpander took $7.5 million from Pico Venture Partners on August 17 for a harness that runs agents as portable workloads inside the customer's own environment, model-agnostic and cloud-agnostic. FriskAI raised a $3.6 million pre-seed from MaC Venture Capital for runtime observability: logging what a deployed agent actually did and spotting when it stops behaving normally. Kily raised ₹30 crore, about $3.2 million, from Sorin Investments for agents that run listings, pricing, ads and inventory for consumer brands across Amazon, Flipkart, Blinkit and Zepto. Kily's stage is inferred rather than stated, which is flagged in the table.

Read the seventeen together and the split from July persists, sharper. Thirteen of the seventeen sell something around the agent: the control layer (Zenity, Obsidian, Arrakis Security, Alice, FriskAI, and arguably CodeRabbit's new governance product), the layer agents run on (Acrab, Naïve, Xpander, Sapiom, Keenable, Arga Labs), or the path to getting one deployed (June). Four sell finished agents to named customers: HappyRobot, Instinct, Runable, Kily. Investors are still paying most for the things around the agent rather than the agent itself, and seven of the ten rounds missed on the earlier passes landed on that same side of the line.

What this page got wrong about the back half. The September 7 update said August's money was front-loaded, all seven rounds between August 3 and 12, and that a sweep of August 16 to 31 had found nothing. Six rounds worth $454.5 million landed in that window: Xpander on the 17th, Alice and Keenable on the 25th, Instinct, Runable and Arga Labs on the 26th. The front-loading was an artifact of when this page looked, not of when money moved. Announcement lag runs about two to four weeks, so any month looks empty in its final fortnight and fills in afterwards. That is now a standing correction on this page rather than a one-off.

For the record on what genuinely was absent that week: across August 8 to 14, the ten largest disclosed US rounds included exactly one agent company, CodeRabbit. Databricks ($5 billion) and River AI ($1.1 billion) took the headlines, and neither is an agent company by this tracker's definition.

The $2 billion round that used to be a rumour

The largest AI agent funding number in circulation during August is not on the August list above, and that was deliberate. Bloomberg reported late on August 11, and TechCrunch picked it up the following day, that Cognition was in talks to raise more than $1 billion at a valuation of at least $40 billion. Cognition makes Devin, the coding agent, and counts Citi, Mercedes-Benz, Goldman Sachs, NASA, and the US Army and Navy among its customers. In May it raised $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation, so the reported mark is a step up of roughly 50% in under three months.

The reason given is revenue rather than sentiment. Cognition's annualized revenue run rate is described as nearing $1 billion, against the roughly $492 million its chief executive confirmed to TechCrunch in May. That is a genuine doubling in a quarter, and it is the sort of number that moves a valuation without needing a story.

It stayed out of August's totals, because a round in talks is not a round. Terms change, valuations get repriced between the leak and the term sheet, and some widely reported raises never close at all. This tracker counts disclosed rounds with a named amount and a named lead, which is the only standard that keeps a running total meaningful. The wait cost four weeks and gained accuracy in both directions: the round closed on September 8 at over $2 billion and a $48 billion valuation, not the $1 billion at $40 billion that was reported in August. It is now in the September table, under its real date.

What we are still watching. Does agent payments come back? July's two payments rounds (AIsa, then Natural) still have no follow-up in August or in September's first half, which either means the category is consolidating quietly or it stalled. Does anything beat the Prime Intellect comparable? A $100 million run rate at a $1 billion valuation set the July benchmark; HappyRobot's $1.2 billion, CodeRabbit's $1.5 billion and Instinct's $2.5 billion have cleared it on valuation, so the question turns to which of them discloses revenue to match. Does the deployment layer get a second round? It got three. Sapiom, Xpander and Arga Labs all sell some version of making somebody else's agent work inside a real system, which turns June from a one-off into a category.

A note on what is not here, because two of August's most-repeated "rounds" are recycled. Several aggregators file 8090's $135 million under August; it is a late-June round and it appears in the spillover list below where it belongs. The same aggregators report an $80 million Sail Research round as August news; that announcement is also from June, and it is already in our sources list under its real date. Both are the failure mode this tracker exists to avoid: a round gets re-dated every time it is re-blogged, and the quarter's totals inflate. We date every round to the company's own announcement or a dated report from a named publication, and we exclude anything we cannot tie to one.

Two large August rounds are also absent on purpose, and they are the ones most likely to show up in an AI-generated summary of this month. River AI raised $1.1 billion across seed and Series A in the week of August 8, and Databricks raised $5 billion in the same week. Neither is an agent company by the definition used here: River AI is a reinforcement learning lab building personalised models, and Databricks is a data platform. Both will appear in "AI funding" totals for August, and if you add them to the agent numbers you get a figure roughly nine times the real one. Our correction above works the same way in the opposite direction: this page under-counted August by ten genuine agent rounds, nine of them small enough to miss and one of them, at $250 million, not. A tracker is only as good as its inclusion rule applied in both directions, and as good as the sweep that feeds it.

September 2026 rounds

Twenty-three disclosed agent rounds in the first twenty-five days of September, worth $3.21 billion. On September 7 this page said there were none, and gave a reason rather than a shrug: announcement lag, not a dead market. That reasoning has now been proved three times over. The September 15 pass found nine rounds. The September 21 pass found seven more, five of them dated inside the window the previous pass thought it had closed. This pass found seven more again, and two of those are also dated September 15: Factory's $200 million and Zero's $10.3 million seed. One single day has now been revised upward three times, and the third revision added the fourth-largest round of the quarter. Announcement lag is no longer the whole explanation. Factory's round was covered by Reuters, SiliconANGLE and DevOps.com within hours of its announcement, so nothing was hidden. The sweep behind the last two passes was simply not wide enough, and this page would rather say that than blame the calendar.

Cognition closed on September 8. The company puts the round at over $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, a Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, both new investors, with run rate up from $492 million in May to roughly $900 million. This page tracked it as a rumour for four weeks and refused to count it. It is counted now, at a $2 billion floor, because "over $2B" is the only figure the company has published. The August reports had it at $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation. The closed round is twice the money at a fifth more valuation, which is the whole argument for waiting instead of aggregating leaks.

Temporal Technologies raised $550 million on September 14. The Series E is co-led by Lightspeed with Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Tiger Global, at a $12.55 billion valuation. Temporal sells durable execution: application state that survives a crash, so a process can be resumed rather than restarted. That was a payments and provisioning feature before it was an agent feature, and the company is explicit about what changed. Customers now ask to run agents for days, weeks or months, and a long-running agent that loses its place is worse than useless. Run rate is past $250 million, up more than 200 percent year over year, across more than 4,300 paying customers. It is the largest round in this quarter with an exact published number, and it went to plumbing rather than to an agent.

Agent governance still leads by deal count, but this is the first week it did not add a single round. Eleven of the thirty-three rounds added for August and September sell control over agents rather than agents themselves: Alice, AIR Security, Cymphony, Arrakis Security, AI Score, FriskAI, AIUC, Eve Security, EnforceShield, and arguably Xpander and Lightsage. That is a third of the added rounds, down from the 42 percent it was a week ago, and the reason is that none of the seven rounds added this week sell governance. One quiet week is not a trend and this page will not call it one, but it is the first crack in a pattern that had held for three consecutive months. The three governance rounds from the previous pass split the problem three ways. AIUC took $40 million from Ribbit Capital to certify agents before they ship and then insure the result, running about 5,000 risk-and-attack combinations per business type against a standard that Cursor, ElevenLabs, Harvey, KPMG, Lovable and UiPath certify against, with Lloyd's of London behind the policies. Eve Security raised $4.5 million led by Run Ventures for the opposite end of the timeline: watching agents at runtime and intervening when a sequence of individually legitimate actions starts to look like an attack. EnforceShield took €1.7 million from Vendep Capital and inverts the framing entirely, pointing agents outward to decide and execute intellectual property takedowns with attorneys approving outcomes rather than assembling them. Certify, restrain, deploy: the control layer is now specialised enough to have sub-genres. AIR Security is the clearest version of the thesis: $50 million disclosed on September 1 as a $10 million seed from Sequoia plus a $40 million follow-on from Greenoaks, for a firewall that finds the agents already running inside a company and vets the skills, plugins and MCP servers they are permitted to call. Cymphony launched on September 9 with $30 million, Sequoia again, for a map of which employees and which agents reached which systems. AI Score took £4 million, about $5.4 million, from Fuel Ventures for real-time governance of generative and agentic AI already in use. Nothing the agents themselves do is being funded at that rate.

Seed is where the infrastructure bets sit. Sixteen of the thirty-three rounds added for August and September are seed or pre-seed, and the median cheque among the seven added this week is $21 million. Keewano disclosed $12 million in total seed funding led by Hetz Ventures, with a16z speedrun participating, alongside general availability of a database built on the premise that analytics infrastructure was designed for humans asking structured questions rather than for agents reconstructing why an outcome happened. Empirik raised $21 million from Sequoia for an agent that models an infrastructure change, computes its blast radius, then executes or escalates. DataAgent took a $10 million pre-seed from MizMaa Ventures and Alicorn for agents that find and fix Kubernetes and cloud failures. Lightsage raised $4 million from Nexus Venture Partners to make ordinary software discoverable and usable by agents, which is a bet on agents becoming a buying audience rather than a feature. These are conviction cheques on plumbing, written before anyone can size the market.

Israel is over-indexed. Six of the thirty-three rounds added for August and September are Israeli or Israeli-founded: Alice, Cymphony, DataAgent, Arrakis Security, Xpander and now Tel Aviv's Keewano. Calcalist counted more than $575 million raised by Israeli startups in August alone. Four of those six sell agent security or agent governance, which reads less like a new sector appearing than like an existing cybersecurity industry moving one layer up to where the customers now are.

Vertical agents with named customers are still being funded on evidence rather than on promise. Both September 17 rounds fit that shape. Kastle raised a $24 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with Y Combinator and Commerce Ventures returning, for agents that work inside a bank's existing core systems on consumer lending rather than replacing the core, and it quantifies the claim: more than $1.8 billion in transactions processed. Health Force raised a €4.2 million seed, about $4.9 million, led by LUMO Labs, for agents that log into hospital systems and complete operational work under supervision. At Italian private hospital groups it reports handling three of every four insurance claims without a human. Neither is a general assistant, and both sell into a workflow where the incumbent alternative is a person doing data entry.

Two rounds sit outside those threads. Jack & Jill raised $40 million on September 15 in a Series A led by Air Street Capital for two agents on opposite sides of a hire, one representing the candidate and one the employer. It is the first round on this page whose product assumes agents negotiating with other agents. HeyDiga took €5.5 million, about $6.4 million, led by 6 Degrees Capital with the Italian Founders Fund and Decelera, for an enterprise AI receptionist working across calls, WhatsApp and chat.

Factory raised $200 million on September 15 and this page missed it twice. Per Factory's own newsroom, the round values the company at $5 billion, more than triple the $1.5 billion it carried in April, and takes total funding past $400 million. Nine firms are named, including Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Insight Partners, NEA, Evantic Capital, Sound Ventures, Mantis VC and Clearlake, and the announcement names no lead, which is why the table lists firms instead. Marc Benioff, Brad Gerstner and Nico Rosberg came in as angels. The product is coding agents: a developer describes a task, Factory breaks it into sub-steps, assigns those to a group of agents and provisions infrastructure for each one. Factory 2.0, introduced in June, pushes the same agents into code review, security analysis, testing, documentation and incident response, and the company says Nvidia, Adobe, Palo Alto Networks, T-Mobile, RBC and Blackstone are customers. A round this size, from investors this well known, covered by Reuters and SiliconANGLE within hours, is not an obscure filing. Two consecutive passes of this page simply did not look in the right place. That is worth stating in the same voice the page uses for everyone else's numbers.

This was the week the application layer showed up. For three months the pattern here has been that money goes to the layer that governs agents rather than to agents doing work. Five of this week's seven rounds break that. Ema raised $77 million led by Creaegis, with Accel, Section 32 and Prosus increasing their stakes, taking total funding to $140 million at a valuation it more than quadrupled but declined to publish. Ema sells what it calls AI employees, teams of agents coordinated across HR, finance and IT, and it reports more than 50 active enterprise deals, over a million active enterprise users and more than five million actions and queries, with NTT DATA, Hitachi, ADP, PwC, Google, KPMG, Wipro and Microsoft named as customers. Sela took $21 million across seed and Series A led by Costanoa for voice agents that work mortgage sales calls, and it is unusually specific about proof: six of the ten largest independent mortgage banks in the United States use it, annualised run-rate revenue crossed $10 million in 18 months, and in one A/B test across more than 10,000 prospective borrowers the agents raised lead-to-lock rates 9 percent. Zero raised a $10.3 million seed led by Primary Venture Partners and launched publicly the same day, replacing the CRM with agents that build prospect lists, run outbound, update records and watch customer health. Ando came out of stealth with $20 million in pre-seed and seed money from Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence, with no lead named, for a team messaging app where agents get their own identities and permissions rather than sitting behind a bot integration. Founder Sara Du's example of what that buys is an agent noticing two channels discussing the same problem and, unprompted, opening a group chat to connect them. Four of those five sell a job getting done, not a control surface over one.

The other two rounds fund what agents read. Firecrawl raised a $75 million Series B led by Smash Capital, with Altos Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Freestyle and Offline Ventures participating, alongside launching Alexandria: one interface through which an agent reaches official data providers under paid agreements, Firecrawl's own indexes including tens of millions of scientific paper abstracts, and the live web. The problem it names is worth repeating because it is the whole thesis of the agent data layer: an agent researching a company can read that company's website, but its filings and financial data each sit behind a separate API with its own pricing and format, so developers either build every integration or leave sources out. Notably, Firecrawl says it pays the researchers, publishers and providers who supply the library, which is a different bet from crawling and hoping. Ekai raised $1.7 million in pre-seed money led by Misneach, with C10 Labs, for the same problem one layer in: giving agents verified business context by putting domain experts in charge of defining what company terms actually mean, across Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Postgres, ClickHouse, DuckDB, Redshift and Azure Synapse. At $75 million and $1.7 million these are not comparable companies, but they are answers to the same question, which is that an agent with a good model and no trustworthy context is still guessing.

September is open and re-checked weekly, and the last three weeks are the clearest demonstration yet of why that matters. September 21 was checked and produced no agent rounds; September 26 and 27 were a weekend with nothing on the record; September 28 is the day of this pass, so the usable window closes September 25. Expect the 26th to the 30th to fill in through October, and expect some of it to be backdated into days already listed above, because that has now happened on every single pass. Final Q3 totals land in the early-October pass, and on this page's record they will be higher than what you are reading now. For what enterprises are actually deploying against all this capital, see enterprise adoption trends.

Where the money is going

July's sixteen rounds sort into three groups, and the third one now leads on money as well as on deal count. Infrastructure for agents took the single largest cheque and both payments rounds: Prime Intellect's training and evaluation stack ($130 million), plus the rails that let agents move money without a human clicking approve (Natural, $30 million; AIsa, $6.5 million). Vertical agents with named customers took a cluster of their own: Lyzr, Freehand, Arrakis, Encore AI, LinqAlpha, and Build, not one of them a general-purpose assistant or a thin wrapper over a model. And in the month's back half, governance got funded at scale for the first time: Onyx Security ($113 million), Neo Security ($100 million), Act Security ($60 million), Mate Security ($35 million), and Hush Security ($30 million) raised $338 million between them between July 18 and 29, every one of them selling control over what an agent is allowed to touch rather than the agent itself. August and the first half of September repeated the pattern, which is why this page now sweeps the control layer separately each month.

The late-June spillover, rounds announced in Q2's final days but shaping this quarter's market, makes the same point at larger scale.

• 8090 raised a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures for an enterprise coding-agent platform aimed at regulated industries, with Chamath Palihapitiya stepping in as CEO (TechCrunch).
• Trase raised a $107 million seed led by ARCH Venture Partners for an agentic operating system for healthcare and defense back offices (Business Wire).
• Sail Research raised $80 million across seed and Series A at a $450 million valuation, led by Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, for a from-scratch inference stack for long-horizon agents (company announcement).
• Convey raised $38 million from Andreessen Horowitz for enterprise "AI teammates" after reporting $50 million in annual recurring revenue within seven months.
• Pie raised $19.5 million from Lightspeed for AI receptionists serving Main Street businesses (Business Wire).

Sort those companies and the taxonomy writes itself: infrastructure for agents (Sail, AIsa, plus search-for-agents plays like Seltz's $12.5 million June seed), coding and enterprise agents (8090, Convey), and vertical agents with named customers (Trase, LinqAlpha, Build, Pie). Investors are backing the layers they believe survive better models, the same hierarchy Q2 showed with Cognition's billion-dollar raise at the top. What has changed since Q2 is the seed sizes: $107 million (Trase) is not a seed round in any historical sense, and it signals investors paying Series B prices for conviction-stage companies in the agent category. For what enterprises are actually deploying against all this capital, see enterprise adoption trends and the adoption statistics roundup.

The bootstrapped counter-trend

The counter-trend from Q2 is intact: you no longer need venture capital to build an agent company. Model inference, the largest variable cost of an agent product, keeps falling as labs compete, and the tooling to build, deploy, and monitor agents is off the shelf. A two-person team in 2026 ships a real agent product for a fraction of the 2023 cost, reaches revenue, and never takes the meeting. The rounds above are real, but they are the visible minority of a market where many durable agent businesses are simply not raising.

This is not anti-venture. Foundation models genuinely need billions; Sail's inference stack is capital-intensive by nature; a payments network like AIsa benefits from war-chest credibility. But the assumption that every agent startup must raise to compete gets weaker every quarter, and the H1 concentration numbers show why: when 43 percent of all funding goes to two companies, the venture path for everyone else is narrower than the headlines suggest. We laid out the broader case in why bootstrapping, not VC and the practical playbook in bootstrapping an AI agent platform in 2026.

Why Gravity chose not to raise

I have started three companies and shut down three. That history is exactly why I bootstrapped Gravity rather than raising. Each previous time, outside expectations pulled the product away from what the people using it actually needed and toward what the next deck required. Bootstrapping leaves one constituency to answer to: the people running agents on the platform.

The decision also flows from how Gravity charges. We sell flat subscriptions with usage included: the free tier covers one agent, paid plans start at $20 a month with a lot of usage included, and you buy more usage only when your agents run more. Revenue grows when real usage grows, with no pressure to inflate a seat count or chase a growth story for a board. The model is explained in how Gravity pricing works, and the money side of running this way is in the economics of bootstrapped AI agents. Watching a quarter where seed rounds hit nine figures does not change the calculus; if anything, it confirms it. Companies built to outlast the funding cycle are the ones whose survival never depended on the cycle.

Q2 2026 recap: the quarter this tracker absorbed

This tracker began as a quarterly series; the Q2 2026 edition now lives here so the full 2026 funding picture stays on one page. The quarter in four facts. First, the backdrop: Q1 2026 set a record, more than double the prior quarter, and Q2 kept the concentration pattern, with more than 70 percent of global VC going to AI companies. One caution on that Q1 number, because it is the most commonly mis-quoted figure in this whole space: it depends entirely on who is counting. Crunchbase puts Q1 at $305 billion, while KPMG's Venture Pulse records $330.9 billion, because KPMG counts growth-stage and debt-adjacent instruments that Crunchbase leaves out. Neither is wrong; they measure different things. This page uses Crunchbase throughout so the quarters stay comparable. Second, the headline round: Cognition, maker of the Devin coding agent, raised over $1 billion at a $26 billion valuation in late May 2026. Third, the valuation signal: Cognition jumped from $10.2 billion to $26 billion in roughly eight months while reporting a $492 million revenue run-rate, the clearest single example of price running ahead of revenue. Fourth, where the money went: foundation models, coding agents, and defense and infrastructure plays took the mega-rounds, while most application-layer agent startups raised modestly or not at all. The bootstrapped counter-trend that Q3 continues to show was already visible then.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which AI agent startups raised funding in July 2026?

Sixteen disclosed rounds worth $851 million, after a re-check on September 15, 2026 added three the earlier passes missed. In order of size: Prime Intellect ($130 million Series A, agent infrastructure), Onyx Security ($113 million Series B, control over agents inside corporate systems), Lyzr ($100 million Series B, enterprise agents), Neo Security ($100 million, agentic software control), Freehand ($75 million Series B, procurement agents), Act Security ($60 million seed and Series A, agent access control), Oak ($60 million, agent identity), Arrakis ($38 million Series A and seed, industrial agent OS), Mate Security ($35 million Series A, agent-run security operations), Natural ($30 million Series A, agent payments), Encore AI ($30 million Series A, revenue agents), Hush Security ($30 million Series A, agent identity), LinqAlpha ($22 million Series A, investment research agents), Smallest.ai ($13 million Series A, voice agents), Build ($8.5 million seed, infrastructure due diligence), and AIsa ($6.5 million seed, agent payments). This tracker adds new rounds monthly.

How much have AI agent startups raised in Q3 2026 so far?

About $5.25 billion across 56 disclosed rounds through September 25, 2026: sixteen in July worth $851 million, seventeen in August worth $1.19 billion, and twenty-three in September so far worth $3.21 billion. Three rounds are most of September. Cognition closed on September 8 at what the company calls over $2 billion, counted here at a $2 billion floor because no exact figure has been published, Temporal Technologies closed $550 million on September 14, and Factory closed $200 million on September 15. Strip Cognition out and Q3 stands at 55 rounds and $3.25 billion, which is the number to use when comparing months. The median round across the quarter is $30 million and has not moved since July, through five upward corrections to the totals. Be careful with larger numbers you may see elsewhere: totals in the $1.8 billion range for July circulate widely, but they are built by counting AI infrastructure megadeals and, in some cases, rounds from previous years. The genuine backdrop is still enormous, with Crunchbase counting a record $510 billion in global venture funding in H1 2026.

What was the biggest AI agent funding round in July 2026?

Prime Intellect's $130 million Series A, announced July 8, 2026, led by Radical Ventures at a $1 billion valuation, with Nvidia Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and Iconiq participating. Prime Intellect sells the compute, reinforcement learning, and evaluation stack enterprises use to build and train their own agents, and reports a $100 million annualized revenue run rate with customers including Ramp and Zapier.

Are investors still funding AI agent startups in 2026?

Yes, at record levels, but with sharp concentration. More than 70 percent of Q2 2026 global venture capital went to AI companies, and OpenAI and Anthropic alone absorbed 43 percent of all H1 funding. For agent startups specifically, money favors agent infrastructure and vertical agents with revenue, not thin wrappers over models.

Do you need venture capital to start an AI agent company in 2026?

No. Falling inference costs and off-the-shelf tooling let small teams reach revenue before raising, and many choose not to raise at all. Venture capital makes sense for capital-intensive layers like foundation models; many application and platform agent businesses can bootstrap to profitability, as Gravity does.

Where is the Q2 2026 edition of this tracker?

The Q2 2026 edition has been merged into this page, and its old address now redirects here. The Q2 recap section keeps the quarter's headline numbers, including Cognition's $1 billion-plus raise at a $26 billion valuation. This Q3 page is the current edition and updates monthly through September 2026.

Where can I find AI agent startup funding news for August 2026?

This tracker is updated as Q3 2026 rounds are announced, with each entry listing the company, round size, lead investors, and what the funding signals about the agent market. August 2026 entries are added in the quarter table above as they close. For the prior quarter's picture, the linked earlier trackers cover Q1 and Q2 rounds and the running totals.

The bottom line

Thirteen weeks in, Q3 2026 is 56 disclosed agent rounds and $5.25 billion, and three rounds are more than half of it. Cognition closed on September 8 at over $2 billion, four weeks after this page declined to count the rumour of it. Temporal closed $550 million on September 14 and Factory $200 million on September 15. Take Cognition out and the quarter reads 55 rounds and $3.25 billion, rising month over month on deal count as well as on dollars: sixteen rounds in July, seventeen in August, twenty-three in September's first twenty-five days. The median cheque is $30 million and it has not moved all quarter. The average without Cognition is $59.0 million. That gap is the signature of a market where a handful of rounds get much larger while the middle stays exactly where it was, and the median holding at $30 million across five separate upward revisions is the strongest evidence on this page that the middle is genuinely stable rather than just under-observed.

The clearest structural finding is not cheque size, it is who gets the cheques. Eleven of the thirty-three August and September rounds added over the last three passes sell control over agents rather than agents, and July's cluster alone was $338 million once corrected. Investors have been buying the brakes and the engine mounts faster than the car. This week is the first exception: none of the seven rounds added sell governance, and five of them sell agents that do a named job, from mortgage calls to code review to CRM. One week does not overturn three months, and it would be dishonest to present it as a turning point. It is worth watching whether October confirms it.

The second finding is about this page. It has under-counted five times now, twice in July, once in August and twice in September, and every correction moved the same way. For four of those, announcement lag was a fair explanation: a round closes before anyone writes about it, so a month looks thin while it is happening and fills in afterwards. The September 7 edition of this section said September had no rounds and predicted they would arrive. Nine did, in eight days. The September 15 edition put the first fifteen days at nine rounds, and six days later five more turned up dated inside that same window, one of them for $550 million. The fifth correction does not get that excuse. Factory's $200 million was announced on September 15 and reported the same day by Reuters, SiliconANGLE and DevOps.com, and two passes of this page walked past it. The lesson is narrower than the earlier ones and less comfortable: a tracker is only as good as the width of its weekly sweep, and a $200 million round hiding in plain sight is a process failure, not a market feature. The sweep is wider from this pass on.

Final Q3 accounting lands in early October with September 26 to 30 included, plus whatever backdates into the weeks already recorded here. If you want the previous quarter's picture first, start with the Q2 recap. For the argument underneath all of this, that most agent companies do not need any of this money, see why bootstrapping, not VC.

Sources

• Factory: Factory raises $200M at a $5B valuation, company newsroom (September 15, 2026), added to the September table on September 28, 2026 after both the September 15 and September 21 passes missed it; the announcement names nine investors and no lead
• SiliconANGLE: Factory raises $200M for its self-improving software development platform (September 15, 2026), used for the product description; note this write-up prints the valuation as "$5 million", which the company release and every other account give as $5 billion
• DevOps.com: Factory raises $200M as it builds agents across the software lifecycle (September 15, 2026), the source for the full nine-firm investor list and for the fact that Factory named no lead
• Zero: We raised $10.3M to build what comes after CRM, company announcement (September 15, 2026), added to the September table on September 28, 2026; the company figure is $10.3 million, where some European coverage gives €8.93 million and some rounds it to $10 million
• Firecrawl: Firecrawl raises $75M Series B and launches Alexandria, company announcement (September 22, 2026)
• Sela: $21 million across seed and Series A, PR Newswire (September 22, 2026), the source for Costanoa as lead; several secondary write-ups name Emergence Capital as lead, and the company's own release puts Emergence as a participant
• TechCrunch: Ema raises $77M as AI starts eating into enterprise software and services (September 23, 2026)
• SiliconANGLE: Ekai raises $1.7M to give enterprise AI agents verified business context (September 23, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Ando wants to take on Slack with a team messaging app that lets humans and agents work together (September 24, 2026)
• Tech Startups: Startup funding news, September 21, 2026 (used to confirm no agent rounds that day)
• Tech Startups: Startup funding news, September 25, 2026 (used to confirm no agent rounds that day)
• Cognition: Series E, company announcement (September 8, 2026), the round recorded here at a $2 billion floor because the company states "over $2B" and no exact figure
• TechCrunch: AIR raises $50M to help companies vet the skills and add-ons AI agents use (September 1, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Sequoia-incubated Empirik launches with $21M to predict outages before they happen (September 1, 2026)
• Calcalist: DataAgent raises $10M pre-seed for agents that fix Kubernetes and cloud failures (September 1, 2026)
• Tech.eu: UK startup AI Score raises $5.4M to scale its enterprise AI governance platform (September 4, 2026)
• SiliconANGLE: Lightsage gets $4M to help software makers sell directly to autonomous AI agents (September 8, 2026)
• SiliconANGLE: Cymphony launches with $30M to track what AI agents can reach (September 9, 2026)
• TechStartups: startup funding news, September 10, 2026, the source for HeyDiga's €5.5 million seed
• The Next Web: Jack & Jill raises $40M Series A (September 15, 2026)
• Temporal: Temporal raises $550M at a $12.55B valuation as demand grows for reliable AI infrastructure, company announcement (September 14, 2026), added on September 21, 2026; corroborated by Crunchbase News for the week of September 12-18
• AIUC: $40M Series A from Ribbit and First Harmonic, company announcement via PR Newswire (September 15, 2026), added on September 21, 2026
• Keewano: $12M and the launch of KeewanoDB, company announcement via PR Newswire (September 15, 2026), the $12 million is total seed funding disclosed at general availability, led by Hetz Ventures; added on September 21, 2026
• SiliconANGLE: Eve Security bags $4.5M in funding to stop malicious AI agents at runtime (September 15, 2026), the $4.5 million extends the seed round to $7.5 million in total and only the new money is counted; added on September 21, 2026
• Tech.eu: Lithuanian legaltech EnforceShield secures €1.7M for automated IP enforcement (September 15, 2026), the fetchable source this page was waiting for; it names Vendep Capital as lead with FIRSTPICK VC participating, so EnforceShield moves out of Could not verify and into the September table on September 21, 2026
• Kastle: $24M Series A led by Insight Partners, company announcement via PR Newswire (September 17, 2026), added on September 21, 2026
• TFN: Health Force nets €4.2M to deploy its AI agents across Europe (September 17, 2026), corroborated by BeBeez (September 18, 2026); added on September 21, 2026
• Calcalist: Arrakis Security raises $8M seed led by Hetz Ventures (August 2, 2026), an Israeli company, not the London and Paris Arrakis in the July table
• Inc42: Agentic AI startup Kily raises ₹30 Cr to accelerate platform deployment (August 4, 2026), stage inferred, not stated
• Sapiom: Series A announcement, company blog (August 5, 2026)
• SiliconANGLE: FriskAI launches with $3.6M to show enterprises what their AI agents are doing (August 11, 2026)
• Calcalist: Xpander raises $7.5M seed led by Pico Venture Partners (August 17, 2026)
• Calcalist: Alice, formerly ActiveFence, raises $140M from Apax Digital (August 25, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Accel-backed Keenable is indexing the web for AI agents (August 25, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Viral AI startup Instinct has raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation (August 26, 2026), counted here as the $250 million Series B; the headline figure is total funding to date
• TechCrunch: Runable hits $21M to bet AI agents can go from building businesses to growing them (August 26, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Arga is building a better way to train enterprise AI agents (August 26, 2026)
• Calcalist: Onyx Security raises $113M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners (July 29, 2026), added to the July table on September 15, 2026
• TechCrunch: Backed by $60M, Oak steps out of stealth to fix the identity mess AI agents are making worse (July 15, 2026), added to the July table on September 15, 2026
• Calcalist: Mate Security raises $35M Series A led by Canaan Partners (July 28, 2026), added to the July table on September 15, 2026
• TechCrunch: AI coding startup Cognition reportedly already in talks to raise at $40B valuation (August 12, 2026)
• Bloomberg: AI Startup Cognition in New Funding Talks at $40 Billion Value (August 12, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Cognition raises $1B at a $25B pre-money valuation (May 27, 2026), the round the reported $40B mark is measured against
• HappyRobot: We've raised $150 million in Series C funding, company announcement (August 4, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Naïve raises $28.5M to automate the grunt work of setting up and running a company (August 6, 2026)
• TechCrunch: A Marc Benioff-backed startup thinks AI can solve the AI deployment problem (June, $20M pre-seed, August 3, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Smallest.ai raises $13M to build ultra-fast voice AI that sounds genuinely human (July 31, 2026)
• Smallest.ai: Announcing our Series A funding, company announcement (July 2026)
• Crunchbase News: The Week's 10 Biggest Funding Rounds, week of August 8-14, 2026 (used to confirm no new agent rounds in that week)
• SiliconANGLE: CodeRabbit bags $143M to help companies get a grip on the explosion of AI-generated code (August 12, 2026)
• Acrab: Series B announcement, PR Newswire (August 6, 2026)
• Zenity: Zenity raises $125 million to secure the era of 1 billion AI agents, company newsroom (August 3, 2026)
• Obsidian Security: Obsidian raises $85 million Series D to scale AI agent security growth, company newsroom (August 4, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Prime Intellect raises $130M Series A to help enterprises build their own AI agents (July 8, 2026)
• TechCrunch: An AI agent startup just let its agent run its $100 million fundraise (July 9, 2026)
• Crunchbase News: The Week's 10 Biggest Funding Rounds, week of July 18-24, 2026 (Neo Security, $100M)
• Fortune: Arrakis emerges from stealth with $38 million in funding to bring AI to industry (July 22, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Natural raises $30M to reinvent payments for AI agents (July 20, 2026)
• Bloomberg: Former Goldman Analyst's AI Startup Is Said to Raise $22 Million (July 2, 2026)
• LinqAlpha: Series A announcement, PR Newswire (July 2, 2026)
• Forbes: Startup raises $6.5 million by making it easier for AI employees to make payments online (July 3, 2026)
• UKTN: Build raises £6.4M to accelerate infrastructure projects with AI (July 1, 2026)
• AEC Magazine: Build raises $8.5M seed for AI-driven infrastructure due diligence platform (2026)
• Crunchbase News: Freehand raises $75M Series B to automate Fortune 500 supply chain spend (July 29, 2026)
• SiliconANGLE: Act Security raises $60M to take action against agentic access sprawl (July 28, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Encore AI raises $30M to build AI agents that learn from customer calls (July 29, 2026)
• PR Newswire: Hush Security raises $30M to close the AI agent governance gap, with Akamai joining as strategic investor (July 28, 2026)
• Crunchbase News: H1 2026 global venture funding hits record $510B (July 2026)
• Crunchbase News: Q1 2026 shatters venture funding records as AI pushes startup investment to $305B (April 2026)
• TechCrunch: Chamath Palihapitiya raises $135M Series A for his AI coding startup, takes CEO role (June 29, 2026)
• Business Wire: Trase raises $107M seed led by ARCH Venture Partners (June 25, 2026)
• Sail Research: $80 million announcement, PR Newswire (June 2026)
• Business Wire: Pie raises $23.7M total to bring AI-powered growth to Main Street businesses (June 30, 2026)

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Fourteen rounds in this window were looked at and left out, because every entry above has to trace to a named source with an amount, a date, and a product that is actually an agent. One name has left this list: EnforceShield is now in the September table, because tech.eu published a fetchable account on September 15 naming Vendep Capital as lead. Six were added on September 28. Bird.com ($450 million, September 23, JPMorgan) is the largest thing excluded from this page all quarter, and it is out twice over: the financing is debt rather than equity, and Bird is an established communications platform repositioning itself around agent traffic rather than an agent startup raising a round. Counting it would have added nine percent to the quarter's total on a structurally different instrument. Clay ($115 million Series D at a $7.1 billion valuation, September 9, Wellington Management) is a real round from a real primary source, excluded on product: Clay sells go-to-market data enrichment and prospecting, and its research agent is a feature inside that, not the product. Same boundary that kept MIND out. Mantic ($25 million seed, September 18, Radical Ventures) is the closest call of the six. It builds a generalist forecasting engine, a research and scaffolding layer on top of frontier models, and it beat every human entrant in the summer 2026 Metaculus Cup. That is autonomous research, but the company sells a forecasting engine rather than an agent or a tool for building them, so it stays out until that framing changes. Go.AI ($85 million Series A, September 22, Updata Partners) sells on-premises AI infrastructure for banks and healthcare providers; regulated-industry AI hosting is not agent infrastructure. TEKEVER ($580 million Series D first close, September 23, UC Investments and Baillie Gifford) builds autonomous aircraft and surveillance systems, which is autonomy in the physical sense this page does not track. Clastix (€2.9 million seed, September 25, CDP Venture Capital) is Kubernetes fleet management, sold partly on AI workloads, which is not the same as agents. Metacognition AI (A$10 million pre-seed, September 10, Main Sequence) is out because the sources contradict each other on what it builds: a robot instruction layer in one, a memory layer for models in another. SinapisAI (about RMB 100 million, September 10, Dingxin Capital) is model routing rather than agents, with no English primary source and no confirmed dollar figure. Zerolook (€1.6 million pre-seed, August, Zug) sells a flight-shopping API that is not confirmed as agent infrastructure. Owner ($240 million growth, week of August 22, Goldman Sachs Growth Equity) would be the quarter's third-largest round if it qualified, and it is out because we could not confirm an agent product underneath the restaurant marketing software. Manus (reported $500 million at a $4 billion valuation, September) is out for the same reason Cognition was out for four weeks: the reports describe talks, and talks are not a round. It goes in when it closes and when somebody publishes a figure. MIND ($72 million Series B, September 17, Crosspoint Capital Partners) is a genuine round with a primary source, and it is out on product rather than on evidence: it sells data loss prevention across SaaS, endpoints, email and generative AI tools, which is data security for a world that contains agents rather than agent infrastructure. Some coverage frames it as rebuilding DLP around agents; that is a headline, not a product boundary, and this page needs the boundary. Backbone (€4 million pre-seed, September 3, Pitchdrive) is out because its own primary source uses the future tense: tech.eu says Backbone "is developing AI agents" on top of its data layer. A planned agent is not a shipped one. It is worth naming rather than silently dropping, because it is the kind of round that would quietly inflate this table. Socure's $156 million, alongside its acquisition of the agentic fraud platform Fravity, is an acquisition of an agent company rather than a round for one. Deliberately excluded as in-window but not agent companies: Databricks, River AI, Generalist AI ($200 million, robotics), Mistral (€3 billion, model lab), Emerald AI, Gatik, Stability AI, Oligo Security, Corma, Attestable, Inevitable AI Group and Wyre AI. Two caveats worth stating plainly. The sweep behind the earlier updates thinned out between August 8 and 21, so one or two small rounds in that stretch may still be missing, and they will be added with their sources when they surface. And the Factory miss described above means the same doubt now applies to mid-September: if a $200 million round went unseen for thirteen days, smaller ones from the same week may still be out there. Both gaps get closed in the early-October pass rather than glossed over.