The record year is not the market you are raising into
H1 2026 set a $510B record and two companies took nearly half of it. Almost none of that is a comparable for your round. Here is how to build the set that is.
Global startup funding hit $510 billion in the first half of 2026. That is a record. It passed the whole of 2025 in six months.
Two companies took $217 billion of that. OpenAI and Anthropic, between them, 43 percent of the half.
Every founder I speak to has read the first number. Almost nobody has done anything with the second one.
The average is the least useful number in the report
A market with two outliers that size has no usable average. The mean stops describing anything you can act on.
The headline says capital is abundant. Your inbox says nobody replied. Both are true.
They are describing different markets.
I use one rule to tell them apart. A number is a comparable only if I could plausibly have been the company in it.
By that test, $510 billion is not data. It is weather.
Your actual market is about forty rows long
Strip the record year down to rounds that could have been yours.
Same stage. Same sector. Same country or funding corridor. A cheque size within reach of your ask. Closed in the last twelve months.
Run that filter and you do not get a market. You get maybe forty rows.
Forty is enough. It gives you the going ask, the going dilution, and the funds that actually wrote at your stage this year.
Two ways to read the same news
Headline reading
A record $510B year
- Capital is abundant, so raise more
- AI took 70% of Q2, so add AI to the deck
- Valuations are up, so anchor high
Comp set reading
Forty rounds that could have been mine
- Median cheque at my stage, in my country
- The eleven funds that wrote one this year
- What each company had on the day they raised
Build the rows before you build the list
Most founders build the investor list first and the evidence never. Do it the other way round.
Each row needs eight fields. Company, date, round, amount, lead investor, sector, country, and one more.
The last field is the one everyone skips. What did they have on the day the money landed.
Revenue, users, pilots, contracts, or nothing at all. Whatever the announcement actually states.
That column decides whether a round is a precedent or a fantasy. Without it you are collecting logos again.
One row
Eight fields, and only one of them is hard
-
Step 01
The facts
Company, date, round, amount. Straight off the announcement, no interpretation needed.
-
Step 02
The people
Lead investor and the others in the round. This becomes your target list later, earned rather than guessed.
-
Step 03
The evidence
What the company had on the day. If the source does not say, write UNKNOWN and leave it.
The prompt
This is the part I automate. Paste one funding announcement, get one row or a refusal.
You are turning a funding announcement into one row of a comparables table.
Here is the announcement:
[PASTE THE ARTICLE OR PRESS RELEASE TEXT]
My company: [ONE LINE ON WHAT YOU DO]
My stage: [PRE-SEED / SEED / SERIES A]
My sector: [X]. My country: [Y]. I am raising: [AMOUNT].
Return exactly these fields, one per line. Write UNKNOWN wherever the
source does not say it. Never estimate. Never fill a gap from the
company's website or from what you already know about them.
COMPANY:
DATE:
ROUND:
AMOUNT_RAISED:
LEAD_INVESTOR:
OTHER_INVESTORS:
SECTOR:
COUNTRY:
EVIDENCE_AT_RAISE: (revenue, users, pilots or contracts stated in this
source only; UNKNOWN if it states none)
Then answer in one line: is this a comparable for my round?
Say COMPARABLE only if stage, sector, country and amount are all within
reach of mine. Otherwise say NOT COMPARABLE and name the single field
that rules it out.The refusal matters more than the row. Run twenty announcements through it and most come back NOT COMPARABLE.
That rejection pile is the real finding. It is the market you kept reading about and were never in.
What forty rows change
Your ask stops being a guess. You can see what companies at your stage asked for and got.
Your target list stops being a logo list. It becomes funds that wrote a cheque at your stage in the last twelve months.
And your story stops arguing with the market. You are no longer explaining why you deserve a number the market has not paid anyone like you.
The prompt above is on the resources page. Free, no email required.