40% of seed and series A startups are raising $100M+ rounds

3 trends in startups/tech/venture

📈 40% of seed and series A startups are raising $100M+ rounds

• $100 million+ funding rounds used to be rare. In 2026? They make up 40% of seed and Series A funding rounds, driven by investors who want to crown winners early. (Case in point: a former Google DeepMind scientist is raising US$1bn for a startup that’s merely 3 months old.)

• The implication? Fundraising is increasingly a bigger part of a founder’s job, especially for those concerned about building a “capital moat.”

• Is non-stop fundraising a smart move or a massive distraction? It depends on the specific founder and startup. The best investors will help their founders answer this question strategically.

🤖 AI can work independently for 15hrs, versus 10min just a year ago

• METR's latest data shows how long AI can work independently: 10 minutes a year ago, versus nearly 15 hours using Claude Opus 4.6 today. The length of the task that AI can automate has been doubling every 4 months, versus every 7 months a year ago. Extend this trend and we’ll see AI working independently for days within the next year. If AI can learn to be proactive (which is critical as I’ve shared previously), it will become even more powerful (e.g. Moltbook).

• A C-suite executive from OpenAI recently shared with me: AI is writing virtually all of the code at OpenAI: 95% of OpenAI’s engineers use Codex (the company’s coding agent), and the engineers who do so open 70% more pull requests (how software developers notify team members that they’ve completed a feature and are ready to have it integrated into the master software) than their peers, with the gap widening over time.

• I previously wrote about how humans are shifting from writing work to editing work — this is coming true for software engineers, who are shifting from writing code to editing code and managing fleets of AI agents.

💰 Venture concentration hits unprecedented levels

• Per the latest data, the top 10 private venture-backed startups now make up 51.8% of the value of all unicorns that have ever existed. In fact, these 10 companies are now more valuable than all tens of thousands startups that have exited over the last 10 years — specifically, these 10 companies’ value = 112% of all venture-backed exits in the past decade.

• The implication? More money is going towards fewer companies, leading to ballooning valuations and many investors owning a smaller piece of a bigger pie. In response, larger venture funds are starting to pursue opposing strategies from smaller funds — with larger funds writing larger checks and boutique funds investing earlier and earlier.

2 theses on what’s next

🤖 AI will use software, not replace it

• My business partner Sandy and I just taught the third year of our fractional founder course at Stanford focused on software/SaaS. You might be thinking, “SaaS is so 2020. AI is all the rage now. Why SaaS?” Here's my take: While we're all building in an AI-first world in 2026, a shiny AI product without the solid business foundations of the SaaS era is just a fancy demo, not a scalable business.

• In fact, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang agrees. He said markets "got it wrong" about AI killing SaaS, arguing that agents will use software rather than replace it. He said, “Nobody’s going to service better than ServiceNow, and they’re going to come up with agents that are really fine-tuned and optimized for the work that uses the tools that they have.”

• NVIDIA is not alone. Anthropic uses Workday. OpenAI uses Slack. It’s clear that nobody is vibe-coding critical infrastructure, and the business foundations of the SaaS era are here to stay, at least for now.

🤔 Founders, beware of consumptive habits — especially with AI

• Consumptive: Passively reading trends or watching videos.

• Productive: Actively writing analysis or building a product.

• As an example, writing is one of the most powerful productive habits because it forces you to reason and simplify the complex. However, many are now using LLMs to write on their behalf, effectively downgrading a productive tool for thinking into yet another form of passive consumption. The best founders need to conscientious about what they do versus outsource to AI.

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