--- url: 'https://qubit.capital/blog/us-series-a-weekly-funding-roundup-week-2-may-2026-2' title: 'US Series A Weekly Funding Roundup (May 4-11, 2026): $162.8M Raised Across 5 Deals' author: name: Sahil Agrawal url: 'https://qubit.capital/blog/author/sahil' date: '2026-05-11T05:15:53+05:30' modified: '2026-05-11T12:42:30+05:30' type: post summary: 'Five US Series A rounds raised $162.8M this week, led by Fun''s $72M for crypto-fiat payments and Vellum''s $25M for AI dev tools.' categories: - Weekly Funding Roundup image: 'https://qubit.capital/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/featured-us-series-a-66692.webp' published: true --- # US Series A Weekly Funding Roundup (May 4-11, 2026): $162.8M Raised Across 5 Deals US Series A activity totaled $162.8M across five deals this week, with crypto payments infrastructure leading the pack. Fun pulled in $72M to scale its API-first bridge between bank rails and blockchain settlement, while AI developer platform Vellum closed $25M to push deeper into LLMOps. Healthtech, life insurance, and ed-tech rounded out the list. The week showed how capital is stratifying. Series A checks went to companies with measurable traction: Fun is processing $18B in annual transaction volume, Basata has served 500,000 patients, and Ethos has eight years of underwriting data. At the same time, US growth-stage deals hit $1.82B and Series B+ rounds added another $672M, signaling that later-stage investors are writing larger checks into AI-native fintech and vertical AI plays. Series A is increasingly the proving ground where companies need real revenue, not just a pitch. Weekly Funding Roundup MAY 4-11, 2026 $163M TOTAL RAISED 5DEALS CLOSED MixedSTAGE $32.5MAVG DEAL SIZE USTOP REGION BY STAGE Series A$140M86% Series A (extension)$22.8M14% BY SECTOR FunFintech / crypto payments infrastructure$72M VellumAI / LLMOps$25M EthosFintech / insurtech$22.8M GizmoSaaS / ed-tech$22M BasataHealthtech / vertical AI$21M Table of Contents - [1. Fun Raises $72M For Crypto-Fiat Payments Infrastructure](#1-fun-raises-$72m-for-crypto-fiat-payments-infrastructure) [Deal Overview](#deal-overview) - [Investor Profile](#investor-profile) - [Company and Leadership](#company-and-leadership) - [Problem and Opportunity](#problem-and-opportunity) - [Product and Technology](#product-and-technology) - [Use of Proceeds and Vision](#use-of-proceeds-and-vision) - [Market Context](#market-context) - [2. Vellum Raises $25M For AI Developer Platform](#2-vellum-raises-$25m-for-ai-developer-platform) [Deal Overview](#deal-overview-1) - [Investor Profile](#investor-profile-1) - [Company and Leadership](#company-and-leadership-1) - [Problem and Opportunity](#problem-and-opportunity-1) - [Product and Technology](#product-and-technology-1) - [Use of Proceeds and Vision](#use-of-proceeds-and-vision-1) - [Market Context](#market-context-1) - [3. Ethos Raises $22.75M For Digital Life Insurance](#3-ethos-raises-$22-75m-for-digital-life-insurance) [Deal Overview](#deal-overview-2) - [Investor Profile](#investor-profile-2) - [Company and Leadership](#company-and-leadership-2) - [Problem and Opportunity](#problem-and-opportunity-2) - [Product and Technology](#product-and-technology-2) - [Use of Proceeds and Vision](#use-of-proceeds-and-vision-2) - [Market Context](#market-context-2) - [4. Gizmo Raises $22M For AI-Native Ed-Tech](#4-gizmo-raises-$22m-for-ai-native-ed-tech) [Deal Overview](#deal-overview-3) - [Investor Profile](#investor-profile-3) - [Company and Leadership](#company-and-leadership-3) - [Problem and Opportunity](#problem-and-opportunity-3) - [Product and Technology](#product-and-technology-3) - [Use of Proceeds and Vision](#use-of-proceeds-and-vision-3) - [Market Context](#market-context-3) - [5. Basata Raises $21M For AI Healthcare Operations](#5-basata-raises-$21m-for-ai-healthcare-operations) [Deal Overview](#deal-overview-4) - [Investor Profile](#investor-profile-4) - [Company and Leadership](#company-and-leadership-4) - [Problem and Opportunity](#problem-and-opportunity-4) - [Product and Technology](#product-and-technology-4) - [Use of Proceeds and Vision](#use-of-proceeds-and-vision-4) - [Market Context](#market-context-4) - [Lessons For Founders](#lessons-for-founders) ## 1. Fun Raises $72M For Crypto-Fiat Payments Infrastructure ### Deal Overview - Stage: Series A - Sector: Fintech / crypto payments infrastructure - Geography: United States - Round size: $72M - Lead investors: Multicoin Capital and SignalFire (co-led) ### Investor Profile Multicoin Capital and SignalFire co-led, with Infinity Ventures, Pharsalus Capital, and Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen joining. Multicoin is one of the most active crypto-native funds, and SignalFire brings consumer fintech expertise. The mix signals that Fun is being positioned as both crypto infrastructure and a mainstream payments company. ### Company and Leadership [Fun](https://fun.xyz) was founded in 2022 by CEO Alex Fine and emerged from stealth in May 2026. The official domain is fun.xyz. The company describes itself as payments infrastructure for the crypto-fiat bridge, not a consumer brand. ### Problem and Opportunity Crypto platforms struggle to connect to traditional banking. Every prediction market, DEX, and DeFi app needs deposit and withdrawal rails, KYC, and licensed banking partnerships. Building these in-house takes years and burns regulatory capital better spent on product. Fun handles the plumbing. ### Product and Technology Fun provides API-first white-label payments infrastructure connecting bank accounts and card rails to blockchain settlement. Customers include Polymarket, Lighter, and Aave. The company processed over $18B in transaction volume in the trailing 12 months. Its moat comes from being embedded in the largest prediction-market and DeFi platforms, where switching costs around banking and licensing are steep. ### Use of Proceeds and Vision The capital funds a Singapore office for APAC expansion, infrastructure-deepening acquisitions, and engineering hires. Fun positions itself as the money layer for Web2 and Web3, with cross-border payments and stablecoin settlement as likely next product surfaces. ### Market Context The crypto on/off-ramp market is being reshaped by stablecoin legislation including the US GENIUS Act and EU MiCA, plus the explosive growth of prediction markets. Competitors include MoonPay, Ramp Network, Transak, Stripe Crypto, and Coinbase Onramp. Prediction-market handle has gone from under $1B in 2023 to tens of billions in 2026. ## 2. Vellum Raises $25M For AI Developer Platform ### Deal Overview - Stage: Series A - Sector: AI / LLMOps - Geography: United States (San Francisco) - Round size: $25M - Investors: Rebel Fund, Y Combinator, Eastlink Capital ### Investor Profile Rebel Fund, Y Combinator, and Eastlink Capital backed the round. The YC connection is structural: Vellum was a W23 batch company, and YC’s continued participation at Series A signals strong internal conviction. ### Company and Leadership [Vellum](https://www.vellum.ai) was founded in 2023 by Akash Sharma (CEO), Sidd Seethepalli (CTO), and Noa Flaherty. The company is used in production by hundreds of AI teams including DoorDash, Drata, and Headspace. ### Problem and Opportunity Most product teams shipping AI features are stitching together prompts, evaluations, version control, and observability from scratch. The work is repetitive and error-prone, and it slows time-to-production. Vellum collapses this into one workflow. ### Product and Technology Vellum provides prompt engineering, evaluation, version control, deployment, and observability for LLM applications. It’s model-agnostic, supporting OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and open-source. The defensibility comes from workflow lock-in: once a team builds and version-controls AI features on Vellum, migrating is painful. Eval datasets accumulated across hundreds of customers create benchmark insights that competitors don’t have. ### Use of Proceeds and Vision Vellum will scale go-to-market, expand into agent observability and evaluation, hire engineering, and build enterprise features like SSO, audit, and compliance. The company positions itself as the GitHub plus Datadog stack for production AI. ### Market Context The LLMOps market is crowded. Competitors include LangSmith, Braintrust, Humanloop, LangFuse, Arize Phoenix, and Weights & Biases Weave. The 2026 thesis is consolidation around two or three platforms. Vellum’s wedge is product-team friendliness versus infrastructure-team competitors. ## 3. Ethos Raises $22.75M For Digital Life Insurance ### Deal Overview - Stage: Series A (extension) - Sector: Fintech / insurtech - Geography: United States (Austin) - Round size: $22.75M - Investors: Sequoia Capital, GV, Accel, General Catalyst ### Investor Profile Sequoia, GV, Accel, and General Catalyst all participated. These are existing backers from prior rounds, suggesting this is a structured insider follow-on rather than a new growth-stage milestone. ### Company and Leadership [Ethos](https://www.ethoslife.com) was founded in 2016 by Peter Colis (CEO) and Lingke Wang. It hit a $2.7B valuation at its 2021 peak. The May 2026 raise reflects a more disciplined positioning focused on profitability rather than growth-at-all-costs. ### Problem and Opportunity Buying life insurance traditionally takes weeks and often requires a medical exam. For most people that friction is enough to skip coverage entirely. Ethos compresses approval to minutes for most applicants. ### Product and Technology Ethos sells term and whole life policies fully digitally. Its proprietary underwriting engine pulls medical records, prescription history, public records, and behavioral signals to approve policies in minutes. It issues policies for partner carriers including Legal & General America. The data advantage is real: eight years of underwriting outcomes on hundreds of thousands of policies, the largest no-exam dataset outside the major carriers. ### Use of Proceeds and Vision Funds will support continued distribution scaling, underwriting model refinement, expansion into final expense and simplified-issue products, and reaching profitability with disciplined unit economics. ### Market Context US life insurance is a $160B annual premium market dominated by century-old carriers. D2C competitors include Ladder, Bestow, Haven Life, and Sproutt. The 2021 insurtech bubble corrected hard, and most surviving D2C life players are now focused on profitability. ## 4. Gizmo Raises $22M For AI-Native Ed-Tech ### Deal Overview - Stage: Series A - Sector: SaaS / ed-tech - Geography: United States - Round size: $22M - Investors: undisclosed syndicate ### Investor Profile Lead and participating investors weren’t disclosed at announcement. AI-native learning platforms have been one of the more contested ed-tech subcategories in 2026, drawing both consumer and enterprise-focused VCs. ### Company and Leadership [Gizmo](https://gizmo.ai) operates an AI-powered learning platform. The team and detailed founder background haven’t been made public alongside the announcement. ### Problem and Opportunity Traditional learning tools were built for static content delivery. AI-native platforms can adapt content, generate personalized practice, and assess understanding in real time. The shift mirrors what happened to standardized test prep over the last decade, but on a much broader curriculum surface. ### Product and Technology Gizmo’s product is an AI-driven learning experience. Specifics on the underlying model architecture and content generation pipeline weren’t included in public materials. ### Use of Proceeds and Vision The Series A will fund product expansion and growth, consistent with the typical Series A playbook for an ed-tech company that’s proven early demand and now needs to scale distribution. ### Market Context AI-native ed-tech is a fast-moving 2026 category. Companies like Khanmigo, MagicSchool, and Synthesis are competing across consumer, K-12, and higher-ed surfaces. Distribution and content quality are the two deciding factors as the category matures. ## 5. Basata Raises $21M For AI Healthcare Operations ### Deal Overview - Stage: Series A - Sector: Healthtech / vertical AI - Geography: United States (San Francisco area) - Round size: $21M - Lead investor: Basis Set Ventures ### Investor Profile Basis Set Ventures led, with Cowboy Ventures, PHX Ventures, Zenda Capital, and Felicis partner Victoria Treyger participating. The round brings total funding to $24.5M. ### Company and Leadership [Basata](https://basata.ai) is a US-based AI startup serving specialty medical groups. Detailed founder backgrounds weren’t featured in the announcement, but the company has already touched 500,000 patients across cardiology, urology, gastroenterology, and ophthalmology, with 100,000 patients in the past month alone. ### Problem and Opportunity US specialty practices still run on faxes, manual intake, and phone-based scheduling. A referral can take weeks to convert into a booked appointment. The administrative drag costs roughly $1T annually across US healthcare and burns out front-office staff. ### Product and Technology Basata’s AI agents handle the full administrative workflow. A faxed referral gets parsed, patient details flow into the EHR, and a voice AI agent calls the patient to book an appointment, all within minutes. The vertical specialization is the moat: agents are tuned for the specific documents, EHRs, and phone workflows of US specialty care, which generic AI assistants can’t match. ### Use of Proceeds and Vision Capital will fund expansion into more specialty verticals and larger health systems, deeper EHR integrations with Epic, Athena, and eClinicalWorks, expanded voice and document-AI capability, and growth in GTM and customer success. ### Market Context Healthcare administrative AI is one of the hottest 2026 verticals. Competitors include Notable Health, Hippocratic AI, Infinitus, and Abridge on the clinical side, plus a wave of YC-backed entrants. US healthcare admin spending is roughly $1T per year, the largest single labor-replacement TAM in vertical AI. ## Lessons For Founders - Real traction is the new Series A bar. Fun’s $18B in transaction volume, Basata’s 500,000 patients, and Vellum’s roster of production customers all preceded the raise. Pitch decks alone don’t clear the threshold anymore. - Vertical AI specialization beats horizontal positioning. Basata’s tuning for specialty-care workflows and Vellum’s focus on product teams over infrastructure teams both show why a sharp wedge wins in a crowded category. - Embedded infrastructure has the strongest moat. Fun’s banking and licensing relationships, and Ethos’s eight years of underwriting outcomes, are assets competitors can’t replicate quickly. - Profitability is in fashion again. Ethos’s structured extension and the disciplined positioning across most of these rounds reflect a 2026 fundraising market that rewards unit economics over growth-at-all-costs. - Co-leads and existing-investor follow-ons signal real conviction. Multicoin plus SignalFire on Fun, and Sequoia plus GV plus Accel plus General Catalyst all returning to Ethos, are stronger signals than a single new lead.