Biotech Startup Investment Held Steady Even As AI Funding Surged

Crunchbase News — while the AI boom has disrupted funding patterns across the startup sphere, biotech has remained a rare steady sector for investment. For the past few years, global funding to biotech startups has hovered between $36 billion and $40 billion.

Per Crunchbase data, 2026 is on track to stay close to that range. The numbers don’t paint an especially bullish picture, even though overall venture investment rose to a record level in the first half of this year. Still, given that much of that largesse went to a couple of generative AI behemoths, biotechs scooped up a respectable share of what was left. Biggest rounds A few biotechs picked up some especially large financings. A good share of those were for — no shocker here — companies at the intersection of biotech and AI. So far this year, more than $6 billion has gone to AI-focused biotechs, per Crunchbase data. The largest round — and the biggest for any biotech this year — was a $2.1 billion Series B for London-based Isomorphic Labs, which describes itself as an AI-first drug design and development company. Delaware-based Earendil Labs, which develops AI platforms for developing protein therapeutics, was the second-largest fundraiser, closing on $787 million in March. The next-largest AI-focused fundraise was San Francisco’s Chai Discovery, a startup applying AI to drug discovery, which secured $400 million in Series C this summer at a $3.8 billion valuation. Of course, not all of this year’s heavily funded biotechs describe themselves as AI-centric. A case in point is NewLimit, a longevity startup based in South San Francisco, California, focused on developing medicines to restore youthful function in old cells, that raised $435 million in a June Series C. For a broader view, below we put together a list of 10 of this year’s most heavily funded global biotechs. Still an early-stage game, with plenty of exits But while top-funded biotechs may skew a bit later-stage, that’s not the case for the overall startup pipeline. Funding rounds this year are heavily tilted toward seed and early stage, which comprise more than half of all investment and most rounds. This is a pattern we see in prior years as well, as later-stage biotechs often seek to go public after a Series B or Series C financing rather than raise another venture round.