Big venture capital funding rounds are back on the cards, with Horizon3.ai and Glean both closing $100+ million fundraisers this week as investors steam ahead amid technology spending optimism. (Gartner expects global IT spending to hit $5.61 trillion in 2025.)

Autonomous security platform Horizon3.ai completed a $100 million Series D round led by NEA, while generative AI search startup Glean brought its valuation to $7.2 billion, after a $150 million Series F round led by Wellington Management.

The rounds come as Pitchbook said it saw investors highly focused on boosting startups exhibiting “sharpened execution” over just “hot ideas.”

(Aaron Jacobson, a partner at NEA, highlighted the “clarity of their mission and the speed at which they’re executing it” as a reason behind the firm’s investment into Horizon3.ai.)

A successful start to 2025

Horizon3.ai and Glean are just two of big rounds landing in June, with defence tech company Anduril raising $2.5 billion in its Series G round, during which it announced a partnership with Meta, and Atlassian competitor Linear bringing in $82 million in a Series C round.

The funding boosts come despite uncertainty among some investors on the impact of the US-led global tariff disputes on existing supply chain issues, with Pitchbook reporting 84% of VC tech investors anticipate at least some impact from the tariffs.

However, instead pulling back completely, the market database company’s H1 2025 VC Tech survey identified an investor shift to more “pragmatic dealmaking” in response to the concerns, with rise in respondents reporting an increase in ownership stakes during their investments.

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The early June successes don’t appear to be a fluke either, with Swedish AI software development company Lovable reportedly eyeing a $100 million round and European AI start-up Mistral building up to a $1 billion fundraiser later this year.

A flurry of big rounds would be a welcome change for the start-up space, which has seen a general decrease in VC funding since 2021 but has celebrated a strong start to 2025, largely thanks to renewed interest in funding AI.

Notably, OpenAI raised a record $40 billion in March, bringing its valuation to $300 billion and making it the world’s second largest private company, and Anthropic pulled in another $3.5 billion in April.

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