May 2026 was not a normal month for venture capital. Global startup funding reached $92 billion, the second-largest monthly total on record, just behind February, according to Crunchbase data. A single deal explains most of the headline: Anthropic’s $50 billion Series H accounted for 54% of all venture capital raised globally in the month. However, even if you strip that out, the picture is still striking in detail, as AI absorbed $72 billion, or 79% of total funding, continuing to concentrate VC capital.
Ten companies raised rounds of $500 million and above, collecting a combined $17 billion on top of Anthropic’s haul. Among them: defense tech unicorn Anduril Industries ($5 billion), China-based AI labs StepFun and Moonshot AI (each above $2 billion), automated coding lab Cognition ($1 billion), and customer service AI platform Sierra ($950 million). The AI infrastructure buildout continued to drive the largest checks, with data center and compute plays drawing significant debt financing alongside traditional equity rounds.
On the public markets side, AI chip company Cerebras went public at $185 per share and opened at $350, providing a notable data point for AI infrastructure valuations. The stock was trading around $225 as of early June, putting the company’s market cap at just over $49 billion.
European fintech funding remained active through May, with the continent continuing to see a concentration of capital in a smaller number of larger, operationally mature deals. European FinTech investment in Q1 2026 reached $3.7 billion across 192 deals — a 31% decline in total funding compared to Q1 2025’s $5.4 billion, though deal volume edged up 4% year on year. The mood among European investors in May reflected the broader 2026 pattern: operationally sound fintechs with clear revenue stories continued to attract capital, while earlier-stage companies with less traction faced tighter conditions. Infrastructure deals, particularly those tied to AI compute capacity, (non-surprisingly) pulled in the largest individual commitments.
Here are the funding rounds that matter most for the fintech and payments community in May 2026, based on scale and sector relevance.
Top 10 Biggest Fintech & AI Rounds in May 2026
Anthropic (USA) — $50B; Series H
San Francisco-based AI safety company and Claude developer Anthropic raised $50 billion in a Series H — the largest single venture round ever recorded, and enough on its own to account for 54% of all global venture funding in May. The round cements Anthropic’s position as one of the most heavily capitalized private companies in history and reflects the scale of capital now required to compete at the frontier of AI model development, where training and inference infrastructure costs are measured in the tens of billions.
Anduril Industries (USA) — $5B
Defense technology unicorn Anduril raised $5 billion, the second-largest round of the month. The company builds autonomous defense systems, AI-powered surveillance platforms, and military hardware, and has become one of the most prominent recipients of large-scale private capital as defense budgets expand and governments seek technology partners outside traditional defense contractors.
StepFun (China) — $2B+
Beijing-based AI lab StepFun raised more than $2 billion, having also closed a round earlier in 2026. StepFun develops large multimodal foundation models and has emerged as one of China’s better-funded frontier AI competitors, operating in a domestic market where access to advanced US chips is constrained but domestic compute investment and model development continue at scale.
Moonshot AI (China) — $2B+
Fellow Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI also raised more than $2 billion in May, its second round of 2026. Moonshot is the developer of the Kimi AI assistant and has focused on long-context language models. Like StepFun, the scale of its raise reflects continued investor conviction in China’s frontier AI segment despite the chip access constraints imposed by US export controls.
Cognition (USA) — $1B
Automated coding lab Cognition raised $1 billion in May. The company develops Devin, widely described as the first fully autonomous AI software engineer, and has attracted significant attention and capital from investors betting that agentic AI will fundamentally reshape software development workflows. The billion-dollar round makes Cognition one of the best-funded agentic AI plays in the market.
Nscale (UK/Norway) — €670M; Debt Financing
London-headquartered Nscale secured €670 million ($790 million) in new financing from ABN AMRO, DNB, Eksfin, Nordea, and SEB to fund the continued development of its AI data center in Narvik, Norway, being the largest AI infrastructure investment in that country. The financing package also includes an uncommitted accordion feature of the same amount earmarked to fund a 115MW expansion at the Narvik campus. Nscale has been moving fast: it closed a $2 billion Series C in March 2026 led by Aker ASA and 8090 Industries and secured a $1.4 billion delayed-draw term loan in February 2026. A recently signed agreement with Microsoft reinforces the commercial anchor at the Narvik site. Nordic and European lenders are increasingly underwriting large GPU campuses as long-duration industrial infrastructure tied to energy access — not speculative tech expansion — which explains the bank syndicate’s willingness to commit at this scale.
Mercury (USA) — $200M; Series D — Valuation: $5.2B
Business banking platform Mercury raised $200 million in a Series D led by TCV, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, CRV, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital. The round values the company at $5.2 billion — a 49% step up from the $3.5 billion valuation Mercury carried in March 2025. The company reported $650 million in annualized revenue as of Q3 2025 and has logged four consecutive years of GAAP profitability, a genuine rarity among growth-stage fintechs. Mercury serves more than 300,000 customers and claims around one in three US startups that received an angel, pre-seed, seed, or Series A round in the past year. The round followed conditional approval from the OCC for Mercury to establish its own bank charter, moving from a sponsor bank model toward direct regulation — a structural shift with significant long-term implications for its unit economics and product scope.
Fonoa (Ireland) — €94.4M; Series C — also acquired PwC’s tax platform
Dublin-based tax technology company Fonoa raised €94.4 million in a Series C and simultaneously acquired PwC’s tax compliance platform. Fonoa builds real-time tax reporting and e-invoicing infrastructure for global platforms and marketplaces, covering VAT, GST, and other indirect taxes across 100+ countries. The acquisition of PwC’s platform significantly extends Fonoa’s enterprise client base and product depth at a time when cross-border tax compliance is becoming more complex — driven by mandatory e-invoicing mandates across the EU and Latin America. Few tax infrastructure plays have combined a large growth round with a direct enterprise platform acquisition at this stage; the combination accelerates Fonoa’s position in a compliance category that is growing faster than most sellers acknowledge.
Primer (UK) — €86.2M; Series C
London-based payments infrastructure startup Primer raised €86.2 million ($100 million) in a Series C led by Sofina, with participation from Peak XV Partners and existing backers including Balderton, Accel, ICONIQ, Tencent, and Speedinvest. The round brings Primer’s total funding to approximately €146.6 million. Founded in 2020 by former Braintree and PayPal executives, Primer provides a unified payment infrastructure layer — combining payment orchestration, reconciliation, fraud controls, FX, and financial operations in a single platform. The new capital will fund US expansion (with a target of more than a third of total revenue from the US by 2028) and the development of Primer Companion, its AI agent for payment optimization. The company’s core thesis is that AI in payments is only as effective as the data underpinning it — and that fragmented processor stacks create systemic risk as AI takes on more autonomous payment decisions.
Viktor (Netherlands) — €64.7M; Series A
Amsterdam-based AI coworker platform Viktor raised €64.7 million in a Series A after reporting €12.9 million in annual recurring revenue within just ten weeks of launch. That combination — a Series A at this size, predicated on ten-week revenue evidence — reflects how quickly agentic enterprise software is being re-rated by investors. Viktor builds AI agents that operate as coworkers within enterprise workflows rather than as point tools. The speed of the revenue ramp and the round size together make this the most notable early-stage AI round in Europe on the list, with clear implications for how enterprise buyers are already adopting agentic software.
Other Notable Fintech Deals: May 2026
Paris’ Pivot (France) — €34.4M Enterprise procurement platform powered by agentic AI. Enables finance and procurement teams to automate sourcing, approval, and supplier management workflows across large organizations.
London’s Fifth Dimension (UK) — €22M AI-powered decision intelligence platform for real assets — property, infrastructure, and alternative investments. The round targets institutional investors and asset managers seeking data-driven underwriting and portfolio analytics.
Webidoo (Italy) — €21M AI-powered automation platform targeting small and medium businesses. Focuses on marketing automation, lead generation, and digital presence management for SMBs across Southern Europe.
Prelude (France) — €17.2M; Series A Onboarding and trust infrastructure platform for regulated industries. Addresses KYC, identity verification, and onboarding workflow complexity for financial services and other compliance-heavy sectors.
Fazeshift (USA) — $17M AI-powered finance operations platform focused initially on accounts receivable automation. Targets finance teams at mid-market and enterprise companies seeking to reduce manual work in collections, reconciliation, and revenue recognition.
OpenTrade (UK) — $17M Stablecoin yield infrastructure for fintechs, exchanges, and neobanks. Enables partners to offer stablecoin yield products backed by real-world assets without building investment, custody, or infrastructure systems themselves.
Adfin (UK) — €15.3M Index Ventures-backed platform helping businesses automate revenue collection using AI. Targets recurring billing, invoice management, and payment follow-up workflows for finance teams.
Searchable (UK) — €11.9M Platform helping brands improve visibility across AI-led search environments. As AI-powered answer engines displace traditional search for discovery, Searchable addresses the emerging optimization layer for brand presence in those new surfaces.
Harmoney (Belgium) — €10M AI-driven counterparty risk management platform. Helps financial institutions and corporates monitor and assess counterparty credit and operational risk in real time, addressing a segment where manual processes and lagging data remain common.
Cloudgeni (Norway) — €858K AI agents for secure cloud infrastructure management. Early-stage platform building reliable agent-based tooling for cloud operations teams in regulated environments.
A-Cube (Italy) — €4M E-invoicing and real-time tax reporting infrastructure. Supports businesses operating across multiple jurisdictions with mandatory e-invoicing requirements, with a particular focus on Italian and European markets.
PANTA (UK) — €3.4M Platform modernizing the construction and management of financial indices. Addresses the operational infrastructure behind benchmarks used in structured products, ETFs, and other index-linked instruments.
Geordie AI (UK) — €25M Enterprise AI governance platform. Helps large organizations manage, audit, and control the behavior of AI agents deployed across business operations — a compliance and risk layer for the agentic enterprise stack.
Dolfin (Spain) — €2.1M; Seed AI-native platform for sales compensation management. Targets finance and revenue operations teams dealing with complex commission structures and incentive plan administration across sales organizations.
profitize (Italy) — €1.4M AI-powered financial planning platform focused on the hospitality sector. Provides revenue forecasting, cost control, and financial scenario planning tools tailored to hotel and accommodation operators.
DDD Invoices (Slovenia) — €1.31M Platform addressing fragmented global e-invoicing compliance for businesses operating across multiple regulatory regimes. Targets the complexity of navigating incompatible e-invoicing standards across jurisdictions.
Ekiden (Portugal) — €1.7M Blockchain-based trading platform focused on digital asset markets. Early-stage, targeting infrastructure for more efficient and transparent trade execution on distributed ledger rails.
Funding data source: EU-Startups
