Series A liftoff

Author:

Peter Walker

|
Read time:

1 minute

Published date:

July 15, 2026

Series A valuations hit a record in Q2 2026, with the top 5% of rounds exceeding $500M post-money — a dramatic spike as mega-funds chase AI-era founders.

Liftoff may be too mild a term for what's happening to the top end of Series A valuations at the moment. In Q2 of this year, the top 5% of Series A companies raised rounds at over half a billion in valuation.

Now that's not everyone of course! I find some of the emerging manager anxiety about this valuation spike telling. It may just be that mega-funds are competing for a small set of legible, highly pedigreed, AI-frenzied founders. Which should, in theory, leave many great founders outside this attention circle and in prime position for contrarian Series A investors.

But damn, the pull of consensus is strong sometimes.

Onwards!

Cheers,

Peter Walker

Carta Insights

Peter Walker runs the Insights team at Carta, focused on discovering key data and narratives across the private capital ecosystem. In a former life, he was a marketing executive for a media analytics startup and led the data visualization team at the Covid Tracking Project.