Venture capital funding tops $2.8B in June

I’ve got some good news for you: Venture capital fundraising seems to be bouncing back after a slow May.

According to Blockworks Research data, there was roughly $2.8 billion raised last month.

Source: Blockworks Research

If you remember from the last time we took a look at this data, VC funding topped off around $594 million in May. A dip from April, and quite a decline from March (which saw $2.9 billion in funding).

As you can see in the chart above, even last month’s impressive numbers don’t top March, but they did come pretty close.

The biggest rounds last month came from Kalshi (raising $185 million in a Series C), Digital Asset ($135 million), and Zama ($57 million). If you want to include private token sales, then World Liberty Financial joins the list after the UAE bought up $100 million of WLFI and a16z bought up $70 million worth of EigenLayer’s tokens.

Per Tie Terminal data, 21 projects with a focus on artificial intelligence raised roughly $116 million last month.

Source: Tie Terminal

But while it had the most deals, it wasn’t the biggest category by amount raised…not by a long shot. Instead, that award goes to Prime Services, which is basically a fancy way to sum up firms offering a variety of financial services.

Source: Tie Terminal

Five prime services projects raised a collective $1.15 billion in funding last month. So while AI is the hot narrative, and we are seeing folks put their money where their mouths are, clearly the bulk of the funding is still going toward projects that offer financial services.

Blockworks Research data also points to infrastructure still receiving a fair share of funding. Infra projects raised a whopping $881 million last month.

But the most interesting data — for me at least — actually comes from the breakdown of the funding. Not by category, but rather by type.

Types of raises from May, per Tie Terminal data