YWR: PEVC Q1 26 Deal Tracker

Erik

Apr 21, 2026

∙ Paid

Q1 2026 was an inflection point for private markets.

Something amazing happened.

We need to reflect on what it means.

But first let’s go over the top 20 deals.

A link to the full PE/VC investment rounds dataset is at the bottom of the post.

Q1 2026 Top 20 PE/Venture Capital Deals

#1 OpenAI: They did it! This was a MEGA $122 billion raise at an $852 billion valuation. Notably, the investor base included individuals and ARK ETF’s! At $2bn/month in revenue this values OpenAI at 35x sales.

The round was anchored by strategic partners Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank, with continued participation from our long-term partner, Microsoft. SoftBank co-led the round alongside a16z, D. E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc.

There was also significant participation from a diverse set of global institutions including Altimeter, Appaloosa LP, ARK Invest, affiliated funds of BlackRock, Blackstone, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, Dragoneer, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Goanna Capital, Insight Partners, The Paragon Group, Sands Capital, Sequoia Capital, Sound Ventures, Temasek, Thrive Capital, UC Investments (University of California CIO Office), and Winslow Capital.

For the first time, we extended participation to investors through bank channels, raising over $3 billion from individual investors. Today, we’re also announcing that OpenAI will be included in several exchange-traded funds managed by ARK Invest, further broadening ownership and giving more people the opportunity to share in the upside economics of OpenAI and the AI era.

“The OpenAI flywheel is simple. More compute drives more intelligent models. More intelligent models drive better products. Better products drive faster adoption, more revenue and more cashflow. That gives us the ability to reinvest and deliver intelligence more efficiently to consumers, enterprises, and builders around the world.”

#2 Anthropic: $30 billion at $380 billion. This capital raise was a bargain at only 27x sales. Everyone went in on the deal.

“Two years ago, a dozen customers spent over $1 million with us on an annualized basis. Today that number exceeds 500.”

We raised $30 billion in Series G funding led by GIC and Coatue, valuing Anthropic at $380 billion post-money. The round was co-led by D. E. Shaw Ventures, Dragoneer, Founders Fund, ICONIQ, and MGX.

Significant investors in this round include: Accel, Addition, Alpha Wave Global, Altimeter, AMP PBC, Appaloosa LP, Baillie Gifford, Bessemer Venture Partners, affiliated funds of BlackRock, Blackstone, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Greenoaks, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Insight Partners, Jane Street, JPMorganChase through its Security and Resiliency Initiative and Growth Equity Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Morgan Stanley Investment Management, NX1 Capital, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), Sands Capital, Sequoia Capital, Temasek, TowerBrook, TPG, Whale Rock Capital, and XN.

#3 xAI: $20 billion.

Investors in the round included Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX and Baron Capital Group, amongst other key partners. Strategic investors included NVIDIA and Cisco Investments.

#4 Waymo: $16 billion at $126 billion valuation.

In addition to Alphabet’s strong sustained support as our majority investor, the financing was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital, and included significant investments from Andreessen Horowitz and Mubadala Capital as well as Bessemer Venture Partners, Silver Lake, Tiger Global, and T. Rowe Price. Additional investors included BDT & MSD Partners, CapitalG, Fidelity Management & Research Company, GV, Kleiner Perkins, Perry Creek Capital, and Temasek.

Note how Waymo is raising money at a $126 billion valuation while Baidu trades at $46bn valuation and you get their majority stake in Apollo Go for free. There is one valuation for a publicly listed Chinese company, which will involute themselves to death, and another for a Google backed US businesses able to tap private markets.

#5 Databricks: $5bn at $134 billion valuation. 24x sales.

With this new funding, the company will accelerate Lakebase, its serverless Postgres database built for AI agents, and Genie, its conversational AI assistant that lets any employee chat with their data.

JPMorganChase expanded its investment in the company through its Security and Resiliency Initiative’s newly-formed Strategic Investment Group. The close also included Glade Brook Capital, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, funds affiliated with Neuberger, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), funds associated with UBS, and others.

Note that Snowflake with $5.1bn in run rate revenue (+30% yoy) has a market cap of just $43bn. A measly 8.4x sales.

Oh, and did you wonder what ex-Berkshire wonderboy Todd Combs was up to? He’s investing in tech stocks for JP Morgan. Buying ketchup stocks in Omaha was too boring.

“Databricks is a generational company that has become a backbone for enterprise data and AI, helping organizations across critical sectors seize opportunities and overcome challenges,” said Todd Combs, Head of the Strategic Investment Group for JPMorganChase’s Security and Resiliency Initiative.

#6 Shield AI: $1.5bn at $12.7bn valuation.

The Series G is led by Advent International and co-led by the Strategic Investment Group of JPMorganChase’s Security and Resiliency Initiative, with participation from existing investors Snowpoint Ventures, InnovationX, Riot Ventures, Disruptive, Apandion, and others.

The Hivemind Foundation Model for Defense is a domain-specific AI model that integrates high-fidelity simulation with data from real-world operations to help customers accelerate the adoption of AI pilots across new aircraft and missions.

I love how Silicon Valley has shamelessly pivoted 180 degrees on ESG and is now piling into AI terminator companies. Fighting climate change has been replaced with ‘strengthening global resilience’.

And here’s Todd Combs again.

“Through our Security and Resiliency Initiative, we are investing in generational companies who are poised to accelerate innovation, reinforce the defense industrial base, and help advance and scale mission-critical solutions,” said Todd Combs, Head of the Strategic Investment Group for JPMorganChase’s Security and Resiliency Initiative. “JPMorganChase is proud to support the AI pilots and next-generation autonomous aircraft that will strengthen global resilience and national security.”

#10 Saronic: $1.75 at $9.25bn valuation. This is the autonomous ship start up.

“Over the past decades, the U.S. has experienced a steady erosion of its ability to build ships and manufacture critical maritime infrastructure,” said Dino Mavrookas, Co-Founder and CEO of Saronic. “We are confronting this challenge with a fundamentally new model of American shipbuilding to deliver autonomous vessels with unprecedented speed, precision, and scale.

The round was led by Kleiner Perkins. Saronic also welcomes Advent International, Bessemer Venture Partners, DFJ Growth, BAM Elevate, and other new partners and recognizes the continued commitment of its existing investors, including 8VC, Caffeinated Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Elad Gil, and Franklin Templeton.

#12 Skild AI: $1.4bn at $14bn valuation. Apparently, the new thing is ‘world models’, LLM’s for robots.

The Skild Brain takes a different approach. It is the industry's first unified robotics foundation model that generalizes across tasks and robot hardware. Our omni-bodied model can control any robot without prior knowledge of its body form, including quadrupeds, humanoids, tabletop arms, and mobile manipulators. It enables robots to handle everything from simple household chores like cleaning, loading a dishwasher, making an egg, to physically demanding challenges such as navigating slippery terrain. If there is a machine that can move, the omni-bodied Skild Brain will operate it.

The round was led by SoftBank with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA), Macquarie Capital, and Bezos Expeditions, catapults our valuation to over $14 billion. Lightspeed, Felicis, Coatue, and Sequoia Capital have doubled down on their investments. Several strategic investors have also come on board, including LG, Schneider Electric, CommonSpirit, and Salesforce Ventures. Other investors include Disruptive, 1789 Capital, IQT, TF Capital, Andra Capital, Palo Alto Growth Capital, Alpha Square, Mirae Asset, and Destiny.

South Wind Exploration and Global Eggs: This is the first time I have ever seen 2 non-tech companies in the top 20 deals. South Wind is a US oil exploration company and Global Eggs is ‘eggs’. Energy and agriculture… this is a very interesting inflection point. What if the PEVC fire hose starts to diversify further out of tech?

Warburg Pincus, the pioneer of global growth investing, today announced an agreement to invest up to $1 billion in Global Eggs (“the Company”), the largest multinational producer and distributor of table eggs. Valuing the Company at $8 billion, the investment underscores Warburg Pincus’ commitment to partnering with exceptional founders and investing in global companies with high growth potential.

My Big Takeaway:

I said at the top something amazing happened in Q1 2026.

Look at the top 5 deals. Five deals raised $193 BILLION in 3 months!! Also, OpenAI is still private and yet closing in on a $1 trillion valuation!! Do you remember how crazy we thought it was when Apple crossed $1 trillion? And we also have SpaceX, another private company, valued somewhere over $1 trillion. Trillion $ private companies are not a thing anymore.

And look at the valuations. 24x sales for Databricks, 27x for Anthropic, 35x for OpenAI. SpaceX is valued in the range of 40x sales.

Compare this with Nvidia at 16x, Microsoft at 9x, and Micron at 5x sales.

There has been an flippening. It is easier to raise capital in private markets than public markets AND you get a higher valuation!!! This is the complete opposite of what it is supposed to be. Do you remember why David Swensen said private markets were attractive all those decades ago? It was supposed to be less liquidity, but more attractive valuations.

So why is this happening?

Partly, it’s that private markets are where you get the hot new trends, but the fact that OpenAI and SpaceX are still private at trillion dollar valuations is something else. It’s The Insanity Trade.

Private markets are the gated community/the gentlemen’s club where everyone agrees on the valuations and you transact in an orderly manner with a curated investor base. If you are a hot company you also get to manage your shareholder list and secondary transactions.

And you see the beginning of retail coming into private equity too with the OpenAI deal.

So how do we make money?

Is Public the new Private?

Yale, Stanford, MIT, Harvard and all the pension funds spent the last 2 decades selling public equities and reallocating to private markets. They even created new categories (like ‘infrastructure’) just so they could increase the private exposure even more.

They thought they were cool.

But what if they aren’t?

If the whole point of private markets is to trade liquidity for better valuations, but actually private markets are more expensive and more liquid, does that make public markets the new private?

Are public equities the new cool thing?

Let’s skate to where the puck is going to be.

Is Stanford’s 2030 allocation going to be 30% International Equity, 25% Domestic Equity? 18% Private Equity?

Or here is another idea.

London Stock Exchange?

Private equity funds are full of crappy investments they need to unload so they can return money to their LP’s.

But it’s an impasse. Private equity valuations are too high relative to public markets. It’s hard to sell private equity investments into public markets at 30x sales.

So what do you do?

How do you generate liquidity for your investors, sell to the public markets, and still preserve your artificially controlled valuation?

What’s the solution?

Duh. You create a new market.

You create a public market for private companies.

London Stock Exchange has created exactly this.

PISCES, a venue to trade private companies.