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title: state of fintech q2’26
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| Digital banking deals. AI 100 check-in. AI cost management.   View in browser August 6, 2026 Bank on it Hey there,   Here’s what we’re watching this week: Q2’26 digital banking funding AI 100 2026 check-in The AI cost management market booms Let’s get into it. Three mega-rounds nearly doubled digital banking funding in a single quarter. Here’s who drove the surge. Digital banking funding nearly doubled quarter-over-quarter to $2.6B, even as deal count slipped 4%. Three mega-rounds did most of the lifting: Ramp: $750M Series F, $44B valuation Airwallex: $320M Series H, $11B valuation Mercury: $200M Series D, $5.2B valuation Combined, those three raises totaled roughly $1.27B, over 11% of the quarter's entire fintech capital raised.   “With Brex off the board via Capital One’s acquisition, Airwallex has stepped up to fill that vacancy among the spend management giants. Its global expansion strategy and back-to-back valuation step-ups over the past year read as a deliberate push into Ramp’s turf. That said, Ramp's latest $44B valuation still dwarfs Airwallex's $11B number.”   Aisha Chandraker, Intelligence Analyst @ CB Insights Get the full quarterly breakdown in CB Insights' State of Fintech Q2'26 report. Three months into CB Insights' 2026 AI 100, the cohort is already backing up the hype with fresh capital and partnerships. Three months after we named our 2026 AI 100, a list of the 100 most promising emerging AI startups, the class has raised $1.9B across 12 rounds and struck 35 new business deals.   Our data shows that AI 100 winners close follow-on rounds twice as often as peers, and about 198 days faster.   A few standouts: Chai Discovery: valuation tripled to $3.8B with a $400M round this June, which followed Pfizer and Novartis deals for AI-driven drug discovery. Assort Health: crossed unicorn status, closing $120M at a $1.2B valuation as more health systems signed on. Humanoid: landed Bosch, Siemens, and Schaeffler as manufacturing partners, then raised $152M at a $1.35B valuation. Check out our AI 100 tracker to follow the rest of the winners’ activity. AI cost management funding has nearly tripled as enterprises get hit with runaway token bills. Uber burned through its full 2026 AI budget in 4 months, after adopting a coding agent that pushed per-engineer costs to $2,000 a month.   Enterprises broadly report the same crunch. 73% say AI spend blew past projections, per the FinOps Foundation.   And now, investors are following the pain. Funding into AI cost management software jumped nearly 3x to $321.6M in 2025, with $95M already logged in 2026 YTD. Startups like CloudZero and Vantage now map every token and GPU dollar to cost per customer, catching overspend before it hits the invoice. Explore the full AI cost management market on the CB Insights platform. State of Fintech Q2’26 Report State of AI Q2’26 Report The State of Venture Tracker We love you. The CB Insights Newsletter Team GET STARTED WITH CB INSIGHTS Start your free trial CB Insights' emerging technology insights platform provides all the analysis and data from this newsletter. Our data is the easiest way to discover and respond to emerging tech.  Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here Copyright © 2026 CB Insights, All rights reserved. 498 7th Avenue, NY, CB Insights, New York,10018 About Us \| Update Preferences \| Research \| Newsletter |
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