Last week was a big one.
Between October 19 and 22, Adamlead tracked 12 startups that announced a round. Together they raised $2.21 billion.
Like last time, the total hides more than it shows. So here are the numbers first, then every company, grouped by what they do.
The numbers
- 12 rounds in four days.
- $2.21B in total. Two rounds, Flapping Airplanes ($1B) and Legora ($550M), make up $1.55B of it. The other ten add up to about $660M.
- The median round was $55M.
- Stages: 3 Series B, 2 Series A, 2 Seed, 2 venture rounds, and one each at Series C, D and E.
- Location: 6 in San Francisco, 4 in New York (counting Brooklyn), one in Los Angeles and one in Stockholm.
- Six of them are now valued at $1B or more, according to the coverage of their rounds.
AI research and AI products
Flapping Airplanes · Series A, $1B · San Francisco "Frontier data efficiency lab." Founded in 2025, 2-10 people. Index Ventures and Lux Capital led, with Sequoia, GV, Kleiner Perkins and NVIDIA joining. Valued at $6B.
A billion-dollar Series A for a team that small is the strangest number of the month. It's a bet on the people, not the product.
Town · Series B, $108M · San Francisco "Learns how you work." 11-50 people, founded in 2024, valued at about $1B.
Tolan · $30M · San Francisco "Your friendly guide through life." Union Square Ventures led, with Khosla Ventures and Homebrew.
Developer infrastructure
Three of the twelve sell to engineers, and all three are about code that AI writes or runs.
Blacksmith · Series C, $66M · San Francisco "The fastest way to run your GitHub Actions." Sequoia led, with Premji Invest, GV, Y Combinator and Peak XV. Founded in 2024, 11-50 people, valued at about $1B.
Daytona · Series B, $60M · New York "Run AI Code." Founded in 2023, 11-50 people. FirstMark Capital led, and the angels include Patrick Collison, Tobi Lütke and Aravind Srinivas. Valued at about $1B.
Greptile · Series B, $50M · San Francisco "The AI Code Reviewer." 11-50 people. They already have 18 open roles listed, more on that below.
Business software
Legora · Series E, $550M · Stockholm "Legal work, without limits." 201-500 people, founded in 2023. Atreides Management led, with Baron Capital, Glade Brook, Capital Group and JP Morgan. Valued at $8.8B, and the only company on this list outside the US.
Whop · Series D, $205M · Brooklyn "The new economy." Founded in 2021, 51-200 people. Sequoia and Shopify Ventures led. Valued at $5.1B.
Different · Seed, $48M · San Francisco "Every marketer is building a world." General Catalyst led, with Lightspeed, Together Fund and Haystack. A $48M seed.
Coast · $35M · New York "The smartest card for fuel, field, and office expenses." Expense cards for companies with people on the road.
Health and hardware
Baba · Series A, $40M · New York "Don't manage your healthcare alone." Founded in 2025. FirstMark Capital led, with CVS Health Ventures.
Helicon · Seed, $16.5M · Los Angeles "Composite structures for all domains." A small team (2-10 people) building composite structures for defense and space.
Where the money went
Adding the groups up:
- AI research and AI products: $1.14B, three rounds. Almost all of it is Flapping Airplanes.
- Business software: $838M, four rounds. Legora and Whop are $755M of that.
- Developer infrastructure: $176M, three rounds.
- Health and hardware: $56.5M, two rounds.
And for October as a whole: last week I counted 22 rounds and $3.26B between October 2 and 15. With these 12, that's 34 rounds and about $5.47B in October so far, with a week of the month still to go.
What stood out
Three small teams are now worth about $1B each.
Blacksmith (founded in 2024), Town (2024) and Daytona (2023) each have 11-50 people, and the coverage of their rounds puts each at about a $1B valuation. Two or three years old, a few dozen people, a billion dollars. That's where valuations are for small software teams right now.
The three biggest valuations are Legora ($8.8B, 201-500 people), Flapping Airplanes ($6B) and Whop ($5.1B, 51-200 people). Flapping Airplanes is the odd one out: founded in 2025, with 2-10 people.
Two firms led two rounds each.
FirstMark led Daytona and Baba, both on October 20, both in New York. Sequoia led Blacksmith and Whop, both on October 21. When the same firm does two deals in a day, it's worth looking at what else they've backed.
The teams are still small.
9 of the 12 have 50 people or fewer. Flapping Airplanes and Helicon have 10 or fewer. A small team with fresh money buys fast and decides quickly, usually through a founder.
AI code needs somewhere to run.
Blacksmith runs your GitHub Actions faster. Daytona runs AI code. Greptile reviews it. If AI writes more of the code, the tools around running and checking it get more valuable, and investors are paying for that.
Most aren't hiring publicly yet.
Only two of the twelve have roles listed on Adamlead right now:
- Whop: 40 or more open roles (40 is as many as we read per company). Sales, account managers, country managers in Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Germany, engineers, legal and tax.
- Greptile: 18 open roles. Engineers (infrastructure, frontend, security, research), account executives, a forward deployed engineer, a controller and a founding product marketer.
The rest raised in the last week. The job posts usually follow a few weeks later.
If you sell to funded startups
The round is the signal. The job posts come later, and by then other people have noticed too.
A few things I'd do with this list:
- Match the company size. At 11-50 people, write to a founder. At Whop's size (51-200), write to the person who owns the problem: the head of sales, finance or engineering.
- Use the lead investor. If you've worked with other companies the same firm backed, say so. It's a short line that makes you less of a stranger.
- Mention what changes now. Whop is hiring country managers for four countries. Greptile is hiring a founding product marketer. Those are real things you can help with, or not.
Every round above has a company page on Adamlead with the round, who led it, the press coverage, and contacts where we have them. October's full list, updated as rounds come in, is here: Startups funded in October 2026.
Which of these twelve would you reach out to first?
Data as of October 24, 2026. Amounts, lead investors and valuations come from the news coverage Adamlead reads for each round; Coast's amount is from its Adamlead profile. Descriptions are each company's own.