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AI Remains the Most Popular Funding Category in 2026
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Funding trends in 2026 show a growing divide between late-stage and early-stage investment. Prediction Markets attracted the largest share of mature capital, while AI remained the most popular category among seed investors.
Jun 22, 2026
< 1 min read
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CryptoRank
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Late-stage funding reached $7.46B across 126 disclosed deals, compared to just $593M across 115 seed-stage rounds. This creates a 12.6x gap between late-stage and early-stage capital.
The largest late-stage category by funding was Prediction Markets, which attracted approximately $1.8B, significantly ahead of all other sectors.
At the seed stage the picture looks different: AI led all categories with $109M raised, narrowly ahead of DeFi ($101M) and Payments ($93.6M).
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