Fintech funding in 2026: where the money is going, who is investing and which AI wealth startups raised

How much money went into fintech in 2025 and 2026?

Fintech venture funding recovered in 2025 and has fallen back in 2026. CB Insights' State of Fintech Q3'26 report, published on 13 October 2026, counts $59.9 billion of global fintech equity funding in 2025, up from $45.3 billion in 2024 and the highest since 2022's $99.4 billion. The peak was Q4 2025 at $19.4 billion. Since then the quarterly total has dropped three times in a row: $14.5 billion in Q1 2026, $13.3 billion in Q2 and $11.0 billion in Q3, the lowest since Q3 2024. CB Insights puts 2026 on pace for roughly $52 billion, down 14% from 2025, with $38.8 billion raised through September.

Deal counts have fallen faster than dollars. CB Insights counts 650 fintech deals in Q3 2026, against 1,691 in Q1 2024. In Q3, rounds of $100 million or more were 4% of deals but 61% of the money, and Kalshi's $1.5 billion Series G alone was 14% of the quarter; without it the quarter would have raised $9.5 billion. The median fintech deal in 2026 so far is $5.0 million, up 19% from 2025. The money is going to fewer companies, at later stages, in bigger cheques.

Why the trackers disagree

The two free trackers do not agree, and each one revises its own past figures. Read every number with its publisher and its date:

• CB Insights, State of Fintech 2025 (22 January 2026): $52.7 billion for 2025, with $16.4 billion in Q4. Nine months later the Q3'26 report gives the same year as $59.9 billion and Q4 2025 as $19.4 billion.
• CB Insights, State of Fintech Q2'26 (5 August 2026): $11.7 billion in Q2 2026, down 20% from Q1, on 726 deals. The Q3'26 report later restated Q2 at $13.3 billion and Q1 at $14.5 billion.
• Crunchbase News, year-end 2025 (15 January 2026): $51.8 billion for 2025, up 27% from $40.8 billion in 2024, on 3,457 deals. Its Q1 2026 piece (10 April 2026) gives 2025 as $53.8 billion and 2024 as $41.6 billion.
• Crunchbase News, Q1 2026: $12 billion across 751 deals as of 6 April, 5% more than the same period of 2025 and 33% less than Q4 2025's $17.8 billion.
• Crunchbase News, H1 2026 (15 July 2026): $28.6 billion in the first half, up 22.7% on H1 2025 but down 17.3% from H2 2025's $34.6 billion, on 1,605 deals.

So the direction is the same in every report: a 2025 rebound led by late-stage rounds, then a 2026 decline in deal count and, from Q2, in dollars. The levels differ by several billion dollars a year because of what each tracker counts as fintech and how late rounds are added. PitchBook's quarterly fintech reports and Dealroom's data are behind a login, so we do not quote them. The share of the total going to banking itself is small: CB Insights counted $932 million for banking in Q1 2026, about half of Q1 2025's $1.8 billion, with 8 of the top 10 banking deals going to challengers such as Ualá ($195 million at $3.2 billion) and Allica Bank ($150 million at $1.2 billion). Our neobank hub covers those companies.

Which fintech funding rounds were the largest in 2026?

The largest 2026 rounds went to prediction markets, cross-border payments, spend management and Latin American and Indian consumer finance. Kalshi raised twice: $1 billion in March, led by Coatue at a $22 billion valuation that doubled its December 2025 mark of $11 billion, and $1.5 billion in August. Ramp raised $750 million in June at the $44 billion valuation it announced, up from $32 billion in November 2025; Crunchbase News reports the same round as over $50 billion post-money. The table lists fifteen of the largest equity rounds of January to September 2026, with the tracker or company document each comes from. Where two sources give different amounts, both are shown.

Two patterns stand out. First, the 2026 leaders are already large and often profitable: Ramp reported over $1 billion of annualized revenue with positive free cash flow, and Mercury raised at $5.2 billion after four years of GAAP profitability (see the Ramp and Mercury profiles). Second, the largest companies are not raising primary rounds at all. Stripe gave employees liquidity through a tender offer at $159 billion in February 2026, and Plaid let employees sell at $8 billion the same month; both are on our Stripe and Plaid pages. Crunchbase News lists Stripe, Plaid, Ramp, Revolut and Monzo among the companies expected to list that have stayed private on secondary sales.

Which investors are most active in fintech, and what do they say they want?

By number of deals, accelerators and crypto corporate funds lead. Crunchbase News counts Y Combinator in 41 fintech deals in Q2 2026, the most of any investor, while General Catalyst was in the most rounds of $5 million or more (12), ahead of Y Combinator and Index Ventures (11 each). CB Insights ranks Coinbase Ventures first by fintech company count in Q1, Q2 and Q3 2026 (11, 13 and 13), and Andreessen Horowitz first among traditional venture firms in Q3 2026 with 7. For rounds of $100 million or more the leads in Q2 2026 were mostly not venture firms: Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, ICONIQ, GIC, Centerbridge and Prosus.

What they say they want is consistent. Crunchbase News reported in April 2026 that QED is bullish on the AI application layer in fintech and on stablecoins; Amias Gerety, its head of US, said “mostly we're just focused on finding high-conviction companies to back.” Justin Overdorff of Lightspeed told the same outlet in July that startups use AI to compress underwriting, fraud detection and advisory workflows “that used to take teams of analysts weeks into tasks that happen in minutes”, and that for generic digital banks and payment apps, “without a real wedge or distribution advantage, it's hard to build a durable business there.” Elena Sakach of GV pointed to a surge in wealth management driven by younger clients who want AI tools, was sceptical of new stablecoin networks with no clear way to win users, and said legacy banks' slow buying cycles break “the hypervelocity speed needed for AI-level product evolution”. Overdorff expected “mega-rounds for a small set of category leaders, and a tougher fundraising environment for everyone else” in H2 2026, and Q3 bore that out.

What does Sequoia Capital invest in within fintech, and how should you evaluate its record?

Sequoia's fintech record is long and concentrated in a few category leaders. In its own words, from an August 2024 investment note: “At Sequoia, we've been fortunate to partner with leaders in fintech including PayPal, Block, Stripe, Nubank and Klarna.” Its portfolio page, filtered to fintech, lists each company with the stage and year Sequoia first invested. The table uses that page and checks each company's current status against its own announcements. Brex has no company page on sequoiacap.com; it was bought by Capital One in April 2026.

What Sequoia has published about fintech and AI

Three published pieces set out the current thesis. The Bridge note (29 August 2024) is about stablecoins as payment rails: it cites 30 million active users moving $3.2 trillion a month in stablecoins and describes Bridge converting between dollar formats through one API at as little as 10% of the cost of traditional FX rails. Bridge is now Stripe's stablecoin unit (see the Stripe profile). The Nevis profile (2 December 2025) is about wealth management: “AI won't replace financial advisors, but it can turbocharge them”, with tools meant to give advisers 80% of their time back. It says Nevis's customers oversee more than $50 billion of client assets. The Catalyst note (8 October 2026) is about agents in retail trading: users describe a thesis in plain language and Catalyst's agents analyse signals, pick venues, backtest and deploy strategies “with clear limits and safety controls”.

How to evaluate the record: the stage column shows Sequoia getting in early (Stripe at seed in 2010, Nubank at seed in 2013, Kalshi early in 2020) and paying up for leaders at growth stage (Ramp in 2023, Mercury in 2025). The recent bets are AI applied to finance work, not new consumer banks: AI for advisers (Nevis), AI on financial firms' proprietary data (Rowspace) and agentic trading (Catalyst). The exits were large: Klarna listed in 2025, fifteen years after Sequoia's 2010 entry, and Bridge ended up inside another portfolio company, Stripe. What the portfolio page does not give is ownership stakes, fund returns or marks; for listed companies, ownership is in the prospectus and proxy filings on SEC EDGAR.

Which AI wealth-management startups raised money in 2025 and 2026?

Wealth tech is one of the few fintech segments whose funding has risen every quarter of 2026, by CB Insights' count. Its wealth-tech collection raised $7.3 billion in 2025, almost double 2024's $3.7 billion. In 2026 quarterly funding has risen each quarter, from $1.0 billion in Q1 to $1.4 billion in Q2 and $1.6 billion in Q3, for $4.1 billion through September. The biggest Q3 wealth-tech rounds were FNZ ($450 million), Ajaib ($270 million), Ridgeline ($250 million at $1.4 billion), CAIS ($170 million at $2.0 billion) and Savvy Wealth ($100 million). Most AI wealth startups sell to the adviser rather than replacing them: meeting notes, planning, estate documents, proposals and operations for registered investment advisers (RIAs). A second group are AI-native RIAs that employ advisers on their own platform.

The largest AI wealth event of 2026 was a sale. On 26 August 2026 Vanguard agreed to buy Altruist, which describes itself as an “AI-forward wealth technology and custody platform” for advisers and in which Vanguard first invested in 2020. Vanguard's release gives no price; CB Insights lists the deal as Q3 2026's largest fintech M&A exit at a $4.6 billion valuation. Six months earlier, on 10 February 2026, Altruist's AI tax tool set off a sell-off in wealth-manager stocks: Schwab fell 7.4% that day and Morgan Stanley about 2.4%, as recorded on their profiles.

How the incumbents are responding

• Morgan Stanley was first: its OpenAI-powered AI @ Morgan Stanley Assistant was adopted by 98% of advisor teams, and Debrief (June 2024) writes meeting notes. On 10 February 2026 its head of wealth management described “super agents” built from the firm's 3,500 tools, with the adviser approving every recommendation.
• Charles Schwab invests and partners: it is an existing investor in Wealth.com (strategic investment in April 2025), and on 14 September 2026 Schwab Advisor Services became the first and only RIA custodian in Anthropic's Claude for Financial Advisors, reaching its 16,000-plus independent RIAs. Its CEO said in February that AI will help wealth managers, not hurt them.
• BNY joined Luminary's $22 million Series A in September 2026, alongside running its own Eliza platform for staff.
• Goldman Sachs invests in the AI layer through Goldman Sachs Alternatives, which led a $110 million Series C in decisioning platform Taktile in June 2026; its profile lists 70 AI venture deals since 2019.

Which fintechs went public or were acquired in 2025 and 2026?

2025 reopened the US listing market for fintech; 2026 has mostly been acquisitions. eToro, Circle and Chime listed in the first half of 2025, Klarna in September, Navan in October and Wealthfront in December. CB Insights counted 25 fintech IPOs worldwide in Q4 2025, then 4 in Q2 2026 and 1 in Q3 2026 (India's Manipal Payment and Identity Solutions at $820 million), down from 20 a year earlier. Crunchbase News counts three fintech IPOs in the US in the first half of 2026, all foreign companies listing in New York: PicPay, AgiBank and PayPay. M&A fell too, to 230 deals in Q3 2026, down 32% year on year, led by Vanguard's purchase of Altruist.

The acquisition prices show how far private marks fell. Brex sold to Capital One for $5.15 billion, less than half its 2022 private valuation of $12.3 billion, and Navan listed about $3 billion below its 2022 mark. Buyers have been banks and payment groups buying into segments that grew fast in 2024–2025: CB Insights notes spend management saw 4x funding growth over that period before the Brex deal. Most of the companies in the table have profiles on this site with their AI strategy and financials. The profiles that record a funding round, IPO or valuation alongside an AI use case are listed below; the column shows the profile's matching AI entries.

How much fintech money goes to crypto, stablecoins and agentic payments after the GENIUS Act?

President Trump signed the GENIUS Act, S. 1582, on 18 July 2025; it provides for the regulation of payment stablecoins. Crypto funding rose in the two quarters after it. CB Insights' crypto collection raised $2.4 billion in Q2 2025, then $4.7 billion in Q3 and $5.0 billion in Q4, for $16.7 billion in 2025, about 28% of the $59.9 billion fintech total. It has fallen through 2026, to $3.8 billion in Q1, $3.7 billion in Q2 and $1.8 billion in Q3, so the crypto share fell from about 28% in Q2 to about 16% in Q3. CB Insights also found that 7 of the 10 highest-valued fintech teams per employee in Q1 2026 were crypto companies, at $6.4 million per employee against $3.5 million for fintech overall.

The large crypto and stablecoin deals since the Act: Polymarket raised $2 billion from Intercontinental Exchange (October 2025), Kraken $800 million at $20 billion (November 2025), Rain $250 million for stablecoin payment infrastructure (January 2026), Crypto.com $400 million from Citadel Securities at $20 billion (July 2026), and Mastercard agreed to buy stablecoin firm BVNK for $1.8 billion. Stripe's Bridge, which Sequoia backed, received OCC preliminary conditional approval for a national trust bank on 12 February 2026, as recorded on our Stripe profile; Circle and Coinbase have their own pages.

Agentic payments

• Sapiom (San Francisco): lets AI agents buy software, APIs, data and compute. $15 million seed led by Accel with Anthropic, Coinbase Ventures and others (TechCrunch, 5 February 2026), then a $35 million Series A in August 2026 (CB Insights).
• Natural: payments stack for agents that pay vendors and each other. $30 million Series A led by Forerunner's Kirsten Green, $40 million raised in total (TechCrunch, 20 July 2026).
• Catalyst: agents that turn an investment idea into a strategy and trade it; Sequoia partnered in 2026.
• Stripe agreed on 19 August 2026 to buy OpenRouter, which routes AI requests across 400+ models; Stripe did not disclose terms.

These rounds are small next to the $1 billion-plus crypto and prediction-market raises. For now, most of the money for agentic commerce is going to incumbents' own builds, which our agentic banking and payments pages track.

1. State of Fintech Q3'26 — CB Insights, Oct 13, 2026 (cbinsights.com)
2. State of Fintech Global Q3 2026 (full report) — CB Insights, Oct 13, 2026 (cbinsights.com)
3. State of Fintech Global Q2 2026 (full report) — CB Insights, Aug 5, 2026 (cbinsights.com)
4. State of Fintech 2025 Report — CB Insights, Jan 22, 2026 (cbinsights.com)
5. State of Venture Q1'26 (full report, fintech spotlight) — CB Insights, Apr 7, 2026 (cbinsights.com)
6. Fintech Funding Jumped 27% In 2025 With Fewer Deals But Bigger Checks — Crunchbase News, Jan 15, 2026 (news.crunchbase.com)
7. Fintech Startups Globally Raise More Money In Far Fewer Deals In Q1 2026 — Crunchbase News, Apr 10, 2026 (news.crunchbase.com)
8. Fintech funding rises as deals slump in H1 2026 — Crunchbase News, Jul 15, 2026 (news.crunchbase.com)
9. General Catalyst Takes The Lead Over Y Combinator In Backing $5M+ Fintech Deals — Crunchbase News, Jul 24, 2026 (news.crunchbase.com)
10. Our Companies: Fintech — Sequoia Capital, Oct 16, 2026 (sequoiacap.com)
11. Partnering with Bridge: A Better Way to Move Money — Sequoia Capital, Aug 29, 2024 (sequoiacap.com)
12. Bringing AI to Wealth Management (Nevis) — Sequoia Capital, Dec 2, 2025 (sequoiacap.com)
13. Partnering with Catalyst: Turning Ideas into Trades — Sequoia Capital, Oct 8, 2026 (sequoiacap.com)
14. State of Fintech Q1'26 Report — CB Insights, Apr 23, 2026 (cbinsights.com)
15. Zocks Raises $45M Series B to Accelerate AI-Powered Automation for Financial Advisors — Zocks via Business Wire, Jan 26, 2026 (businesswire.com)
16. Jump Raises $80 Million Series B, Led by Insight Partners — Jump via Business Wire, Feb 19, 2026 (businesswire.com)
17. Wealth.com raises $65m Series B for AI wealth planning — FinTech Global, Apr 16, 2026 (fintech.global)
18. Moment Raises $78 Million as Largest Wealth Firms Standardize on its AI Operating System — Moment via GlobeNewswire, May 19, 2026 (globenewswire.com)
19. RIA wrap: Farther closes $150 million Series D to hit unicorn status — InvestmentNews, May 22, 2026 (investmentnews.com)
20. Arca Raises $64 Million to Revolutionize and Humanize Wealth Management at Scale — Arca via Business Wire (Yahoo Finance), Jun 25, 2026 (finance.yahoo.com)
21. Savvy Wealth lands $100M to scale AI agents for advisors — InvestmentNews, Sep 9, 2026 (investmentnews.com)
22. Luminary Raises $22M to Scale AI Wealth Transfer Planning Platform — WealthManagement.com, Sep 10, 2026 (wealthmanagement.com)
23. Vanguard to Acquire Altruist, Expanding the Reach and Impact of Financial Advice — Vanguard via PR Newswire, Aug 26, 2026 (prnewswire.com)
24. Slash Achieves Unicorn Status Following $100m Series C Fundraise — Slash via Business Wire (Yahoo Finance), Apr 16, 2026 (finance.yahoo.com)
25. Charles Schwab and Anthropic to Bring Claude to Independent Registered Investment Advisors — Charles Schwab, Sep 14, 2026 (pressroom.aboutschwab.com)
26. Sapiom raises $15M to help AI agents buy their own tech tools — TechCrunch, Feb 5, 2026 (techcrunch.com)
27. Natural raises $30M to reinvent payments for AI agents and take on Stripe — TechCrunch, Jul 20, 2026 (techcrunch.com)
28. The President Signed into Law S. 1582 (GENIUS Act) — The White House, Jul 18, 2025 (whitehouse.gov)
29. Wealthfront shares begin trading at $14 on Nasdaq, matching IPO price — Investing.com, Dec 12, 2025 (investing.com)
30. Execution of Follow-on Investment (Third Tranche) in OpenAI — SoftBank Group Corp., Oct 1, 2026 (group.softbank)