Venture funding to fintech companies is up year over year so far, but concentrated into significantly fewer companies, Crunchbase data shows.
Global venture funding to financial technology startups totaled $12 billion across 751 deals in 2026 as of April 6, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 5% increase in dollars raised compared to the $11.4 billion raised across 1,097 — or 31.5% fewer — deals during the same time period in 2025.
This trend signals larger deal sizes. Indeed, late-stage or growth funding in the first quarter of 2026 totaled $6.9 billion, up 8% compared to $6.4 billion raised at those stages in the 2025 first quarter.
However, sequentially, the $12 billion raised is down 33% compared to the fourth quarter of 2025, when fintech startups raised $17.8 billion globally. The $6.9 billion raised in late-stage or growth funding is also down markedly — by 43% — compared to the $12.1 billion raised by fintech startups in Q4 2025.
The trend in the first quarter also mirrors what we saw in 2025 as a whole, with global venture funding to fintech startups climbing to its highest level in several quarters, boosted by later-stage deals.
Total global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $53.8 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase data. That’s an approximately 29.3% increase from 2024’s total of $41.6 billion raised.
US booms
U.S.-based startups have historically raised more fintech funding than any other country in the world, and the first quarter of 2026 was no different.
Of the $12 billion raised by startups globally, just over half — or $6.3 billion — flowed to fintech companies based in the U.S. That was an impressive 47% increase compared to the $4.3 billion raised by U.S. fintech startups in the 2025 first quarter. However, it was down 50% from the $12.6 billion that U.S. financial technology startups raised in the fourth quarter of 2025.
The United Kingdom was the second-largest recipient of venture capital, with startups in the region raising a total of $1.2 billion. India came in third, raising $900 million.
Big deals for unicorns
Several fintech startups raised nine-figure rounds in the first quarter, with some doubling their valuations since their last venture financings.
Predictions marketplace Kalshi was the largest recipient of capital in the first quarter. In March, the company doubled its valuation to $22 billion in just three months with a $1 billion raise led by Coatue. The New York-based startup had just raised $1 billion in Series E funding at an $11 billion valuation in December.
In February, Vestwell, a digital savings platform, raised $385 million in a Series E funding round co-led by Blue Owl Capital and Sixth Street Growth. The New York-based startup said its new valuation was $2 billion, double the $1 billion valuation it achieved when raising its $125 million Series D round in December 2023.
And in January, Rain, which is building infrastructure for payments with stablecoins, raised $250 million in a Series C funding round led by Iconiq Capital. Its post-money valuation was $1.95 billion, up 17x from last March.
Investors remain bullish
Amias Gerety, partner and head of U.S. at QED Investors, said his firm has been investing at a slightly slower pace so far in 2026 than in years past. But he cited it as “more a quirk of deal flow” and where it gets conviction, rather than a decision to slow the firm’s investing pace.
“It’s certainly true that macroeconomics and geopolitics play a role,” he told Crunchbase News, “but mostly we’re just focused on finding high-conviction companies to back.”
QED is extremely bullish on the application layer for AI in fintech and stablecoin opportunities, and has backed several startups that Gerety said “harness the power of LLMs with the security and reliability guarantees that finance needs.” (Zocks, which raised a $45 million Series B in January and is building an AI assistant for financial advisers, is one of those companies.)
“Just in the last few months, agents are now actually able to be effective in many processing tasks, but the stakes in finance are too high for LLMs to conquer financial workflows alone,” Gerety said. “Finance runs on trust, not probability.”
Looking ahead, he said QED remains bullish on fintech overall for the year. Part of the excitement is around the fact that larger companies are “transforming” their operations with agentic workflows, Gerety noted.
“More and more transformation is moving from the ‘co-pilot’ phase, and we’re moving into the ‘OpenClaw’ phase, when reasoning agents will start to actually do all the work that was too tedious and slow to be done manually,” he added.
The geopolitical situation will likely hinder some companies from taking the IPO plunge, in Gerety’s view, although a few companies in QED’s portfolios are “bubbling.”
Neil Kapur, partner at TTV Capital, said his firm is on track to make eight to 10 core investments in Seed or Series A companies this year — about the same number as in previous years.
“We’re investing in AI-enabled applications while maintaining patience and focus in our deployment of capital,” he said. “We look for durable, enduring businesses that we believe will withstand the current hype cycle and investment frenzy.”
While TTV is investing in AI-enabled companies, Kapur said it also agrees with Bill Gurley that “an AI reset is coming.”
“Many investors have already made their money by getting in on the ground floor, and others are trying to replicate their success,” he told Crunchbase News. “We’re focused on investing in the application layer of AI, and we’re still in the early days with more widespread prosperity and a democratization of enterprise value creation yet to come.”
In particular, TTV sees the biggest opportunity in early-stage AI-native companies that are solving problems in mission-critical workflows “while building durable moats.”
“These platforms will earn the right to be distribution endpoints for financial products … and are even more valuable in the age of AI,” he said.
He believes we may see some fintech IPOs in 2026, but that they will largely depend on how the potential mega IPOs (from the likes of SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic) perform.
“If those IPOs underperform, others may opt to stay private longer,” Kapur said.
Looking ahead, he predicts we’ll continue to see accelerated adoption of AI in financial services, first through straightforward applications, then more operationally complex use cases.
“More broadly, we’re watching how the foundational LLMs further move up into the application layer, which is imperative to the long-term sustainability of their business models,” Kapur said. “We think financial services and fintech are unique enough categories where de novo startups and standalone businesses will beat platforms building experimental applications.”
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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