Analysis
The headline number is $47.4 billion across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, per Crunchbase News. The comparisons are what make it striking. H2 2025 saw $12 billion across 470 deals. H1 2025 saw $26.4 billion across 436. And the three years from 2022 through 2024 combined produced $41.9 billion -- several billion less than this single half.
Deal count is the tell. From H2 2025 to H1 2026, dollars went up roughly 4x while the number of financings rose about 11%, from 470 to 521. Average check size expanded dramatically; the number of companies getting funded barely did. Concentration is extreme at the top: Waymo's $16 billion Series D in February, co-led by Alphabet, Dragoneer, DST Global and Sequoia at a $126 billion valuation, was close to a third of the entire half by itself.
“From H2 2025 to H1 2026, dollars went up roughly 4x while the number of financings rose about 11%, from 470 to 521.”
Crunchbase's definition covers robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, drones, industrial automation and sensors. Exits in the category have clustered in aerospace and defense rather than robotics: SpaceX's June IPO raised $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation, HawkEye 360 raised $416 million in its debut, and Aevex raised $320 million. The largest M&A datapoint was Mobileye's roughly $900 million acquisition of Tel Aviv-based Mentee Robotics, explicitly framed as a physical AI move.
Edison Partners general partner Ryan Ziegler told Crunchbase the opportunity is wider than humanoids and defense, pointing to manufacturing, supply chain, utilities, agriculture and transportation -- applications where hardware plus sensors generate proprietary operational data over multi-year deployments. He noted that commodity components have made the category cheaper to build in: "Even our mobile phones now have LIDAR scanners on them."
Strip out Waymo and the half looks less like a boom and more like healthy growth: roughly $31 billion across 520 deals, still ahead of H1 2025 but not 4x anything. Both numbers are true. Which one describes your fund depends entirely on whether you can access rounds at Waymo's altitude.