Weekly Intelligence · Week 24

AI Funding Report

Week of May 14, 2026 · 209 Companies · $15.75B Total

$9.45B
AI Funding This Week
60.0%
Share of Total Funding
50
AI Companies Funded
10
Mega Rounds ($100M+)
01

AI Funding by Region

$9.45B
AI Only
United States $6.26B· 66.2% · 25 cos
Europe $2.89B· 30.6% · 12 cos
China $215M· 2.2% · 4 cos
Other regions $95M· 1.0% · 9 cos
The UK alone accounted for $2.78B of Europe's $2.89B (Isomorphic Labs $2.1B + Graphcore $457M + Fractile $220M). UK Sovereign AI Fund participated for the first time.
02

Top 5 AI Companies

01

Anduril Industries

Costa Mesa, USA · Defense robots. Builds autonomous drones, missiles, and warships for the Pentagon. Real revenue ($2.2B last year, doubled from the year before), real customers (DoD), real factories — including a new autonomous warship operation in Seattle. Valuation more than doubled in less than a year, from $30.5B to $61B. Investors are betting defense AI is the next category that gets repriced like SaaS did in 2020.

Defense AISeries HUSA
$5B
Series H
02

Isomorphic Labs

London, UK · AI drug discovery. Uses AI to design drug molecules — predicts whether a molecule will fight a disease before anyone has to make it in a lab. Built by Demis Hassabis (same guy who built DeepMind). The promise: every drug that's currently a 10-year, $2-billion bet becomes a 6-month, $200-million bet. Their AI is now twice as accurate as the AlphaFold tool that won DeepMind the Nobel. UK Sovereign AI Fund showed up as a first-time investor. First real human trials by end of 2026.

Drug DiscoverySeries BUK
$2.1B
Series B
03

Graphcore

Bristol, UK · AI chips. The UK's bet on competing with Nvidia. They've been around for years, but this is the first big check since the AI boom split chip buyers into two camps: "Nvidia or nothing" versus "we'd like a backup plan." Graphcore is the backup plan. Every Fortune 500 CTO who lost a procurement battle to Nvidia in the last 18 months is calling Graphcore.

AI ChipsCorporateUK
$457M
Corporate
04

Mind Robotics

Palo Alto, USA · Factory robots. The same guy who built Rivian electric trucks (RJ Scaringe) is now building robots that work next to humans on factory floors. Rivian's own plant is the testbed. Kleiner Perkins led the round. The bet: if you can build a $50,000 electric truck, you can build a $30,000 industrial robot — and there are millions of factories that need one. Total funding now over $1B.

Industrial RoboticsUSARivian
$400M
Venture
05

Cowboy Space

San Carlos, USA · Orbital data centers. Launches rockets where the top half stays in space and becomes a solar-powered data center. Why: power and cooling are the two things bottlenecking AI compute on Earth. Space has unlimited cold and unlimited sun. First one launches before end of 2028. If it works, every cloud provider has a 2030 problem to solve.

Orbital ComputeSeries BUSA
$275M
Series B
03

Key Trends

🛡️
Defense AI is now a top-3 capital lane.
Anduril $5B at $61B valuation — more than doubled in less than a year. Plus HavocAI ($100M maritime defense) in the top 10. Pair with last week's Pentagon-picks-8-vendors story. The Anduril valuation isn't "modest growth" — it's the market re-pricing defense AI as a top-tier capital lane.
🇬🇧
UK AI revival — $2.78B from the UK alone.
Isomorphic Labs $2.1B + Graphcore $457M + Fractile $220M = $2.78B raised from UK this week. UK Sovereign AI Fund showed up in Isomorphic — that's a new government-backed AI investor on the scene. London-based AI companies took 30.6% of all AI dollars this week.
💊
AI drug discovery becomes a $2B+ lane.
Isomorphic at $2.1B is the largest single AI-drug-discovery round ever. Pair with Chris's Ep35 prediction: "AI in biotech applications is grossly underutilized — biggest gains for humans in life expectancy + quality of life." That just hit.
🚀
Compute keeps migrating off-grid.
Cowboy Space $275M for vertically integrated rockets that become orbital data centers. Pair with Ep40's ocean data centers + Anthropic's SpaceX Colossus 1 deal. Power + cooling are the binding constraints; off-grid solutions are getting real venture funding.
📊
AI share back to baseline (60% vs 66% last week).
The deployment-lane spike from Week 23 is normalizing. 60% AI share by dollars + 24% by count is the trailing 6-month average. AI rounds still skew much larger than non-AI rounds. Cumulative AI funding through Week 24: $299.3B.
04

Practical AI Show Segment

$9.45 billion in AI funding this week. Defense, drugs, and industrial robots all took mega-checks. The UK just had its biggest AI week of the year.

$5B + $2.1B + $400M
Anduril at $61B valuation. Isomorphic at the largest AI-drug-discovery round ever. Mind Robotics (founded by Rivian's CEO). Three different industrial AI lanes, all top-5 this week.
The top 5 tells the story this week. Anduril ($5B, Series H, $61B valuation) — defense AI as a top-3 capital lane. Isomorphic Labs ($2.1B Series B, London, DeepMind spinout) — AI drug discovery becomes a $2B+ category. Graphcore ($457M, AI chips, Bristol). Mind Robotics ($400M, Palo Alto, founded by Rivian's RJ Scaringe). Cowboy Space ($275M, orbital data centers). Five different industrial-scale AI bets in one week.
The UK angle: $2.78B from the UK alone (Isomorphic + Graphcore + Fractile). 30.6% of all AI dollars went to Europe — well above the typical 1-7% baseline. UK Sovereign AI Fund showed up in Isomorphic. DeepMind's home country is finally getting funded.
The Chris Ep35 callback: Chris said "AI in biotech is grossly underutilized — biggest gains for humans in life expectancy + quality of life." That just hit. Isomorphic's $2.1B is the largest single AI-drug-discovery round ever recorded.

Data sourced from Crunchbase, May 8 - 14, 2026