The Intake
GlobalWho raised, and what they are actually building — one plain sentence per company, in our words, with a link to the outlet that reported it. Alongside it, the i-Index: which sectors are winning deals right now, ranked by deal count rather than by headline capital, because a single mega-round can make any sector look like the story of the week.
17 rounds held · 17 Jul 2026 → 21 Jul 2026 · last collected 21 Jul 2026
Too thin to rank. Below 30 deals in a window, sector shares swing on one or two rounds, so the counts below are shown as a tally — not as a claim about which sector is hottest.
- Energy$475.9m5median $11.7m
- Robotics$268m2median $134m
- Space$17.4m2median $8.7m
- Other B2B Software$3.5m2median $3.5m
- Aviation$40.2m1median $40.2m
- Fintech$30m1median $30m
- AI$15m1median $15m
- Consumer Services$6.3m1median $6.3m
- Defenceundisclosed1median n/a
Bars are deal count. Capital is the sum of amounts as reported by the source outlets, converted to USD — it is not audited, and rounds with no disclosed amount count towards the tally but not the capital.
Latest rounds
- 21 Jul 202630 Sundays₹610m (reported)
A holiday booking service that assembles a whole trip itinerary for you instead of leaving you to piece flights and hotels together.
- 21 Jul 2026ORiS€5m (reported)
Beaming power between spacecraft using lasers, so satellites can be recharged without their own large solar arrays.
- 21 Jul 2026Ponda£1.8m (reported)unverified read
Insulation and fabrics made from wetland plants, farmed in a way meant to restore the boggy ground they grow on.
- 21 Jul 2026Greenjets£30m (reported)unverified read
Electric propulsion units for aircraft, plus related defence systems.
- 21 Jul 2026SolarSquareunverified read
Sells, fits and maintains solar panels on Indian homes as a single package.
- 21 Jul 2026Bluecore Energy$10m (reported)
Small nuclear reactors mounted on barges so power can be floated to where it is needed instead of built on land.
- 21 Jul 2026Sowilounverified read
Software that reads and tidies up clothing retailers' product listings so shoppers can find the right item.
- 21 Jul 2026Alta Aresunverified read
Systems for spotting and stopping hostile drones.
- 21 Jul 2026Humanoid$152m (reported)
Two-legged robots built to do physical jobs in factories and warehouses.
- 21 Jul 2026Cascade$3.5m (reported)unverified read
A tool that works out which big construction and infrastructure projects are coming, before they are publicly announced, so suppliers can bid early.
- 21 Jul 2026Circular Materials€11.8m (reported)
Equipment that pulls valuable metals back out of industrial wastewater so they can be reused instead of mined again.
- 21 Jul 2026deltaVision€10.2m (reported)
Plumbing and pumps that let satellites be refuelled once they are already in orbit, extending their working life.
- 20 Jul 2026Natural$30m (reported)
Payment rails designed for software agents that buy and pay on their own, rather than for a human clicking a checkout button.
- 20 Jul 2026Infinity$15m (reported)
Infrastructure that runs already-trained AI models quickly and cheaply for other companies.
- 20 Jul 2026CuspAI$450m (reported)unverified read
A search engine for new materials, using AI to propose substances with the properties an industrial customer asks for.
- 20 Jul 2026Sereact$116m (reported)
Control software that lets warehouse robot arms pick and sort unfamiliar items without being reprogrammed for each one.
- 17 Jul 2026Valar AtomicsRumoured · not indexedunverified read
Compact nuclear reactors intended to be produced in volume rather than built one at a time as bespoke power stations.
How this is built
Where the rows come from
Thirteen startup-news feeds are read once a run and date-gated to the last few days. What survives is filtered down to primary investments into private operating companies — IPOs, acquisitions, corporate capex, buybacks, bond issues, fund closes and government grants are all thrown out, because none of them is a startup raising money.
What we write, and what we don't
The one-line description of each company is ours, written from the reported facts. We never reproduce a headline or article text, and every row links back to the outlet that did the reporting. Amounts are shown exactly as the source stated them, labelled (reported), with the original currency kept alongside the converted figure.
Why the ranking is by deal count
One $3bn round can hand its sector 60% of a week's capital while nothing else changed. Deal count is harder to distort, so it leads; capital and the median sit next to it so the gap between them stays visible. A window with fewer than 30 deals is shown as a tally and not ranked.
The sectors are not ours
Every company is filed under exactly one of eighteen sectors taken verbatim from Dealroom simplified sector taxonomy (18 sectors), so the index is comparable to how the rest of the industry talks — and so nobody, human or machine, improvises a category. See the eighteen and what each one means →
Every figure here is what a news outlet reported, not a verified or audited number, and outlets sometimes disagree about the same round. Rounds tagged “rumoured” are unconfirmed reports and are excluded from the index entirely. This page is general information — not investment advice, and not a recommendation of any company on it. Spotted something wrong? Tell us and it gets corrected.
vc-scan · collected from public news feeds