Three companies secured funding rounds of $1 billion or more in the week ending August 7, 2026. Hadrian, a developer of highly automated factories, raised $1.37 billion in Series D led by WCM Investment Management, Washington Harbour Partners, Valor Equity Partners, 137 Ventures, JP Morgan Chase and Baillie Gifford, setting a $7.87 billion valuation. Base Power, an Austin-based residential battery storage company, secured $1 billion in Series D at a $13 billion post-money valuation, led by Ribbit Capital, Addition, Valor Equity Partners and JP Morgan Chase.
Valar Atomics, developing nuclear energy technology and infrastructure, closed $1 billion in Series B led by Sequoia Capital, plus a $200 million credit facility led by Erebor and JP Morgan. The funding marks a major bet on small modular reactors as a baseload power solution for AI data center buildout.
Other standout rounds included Lumilens (AI connectivity infrastructure, $700M Series A), Whatnot (live shopping marketplace, $545M Series G at $20B valuation), and HappyRobot (agentic AI for logistics, manufacturing, utilities, $150M Series C led by Prysm Capital and Eurazeo).
The hardware-heavy mix—manufacturing automation, energy storage, nuclear—signals capital rotation from pure software into physical infrastructure and production capacity serving the AI buildout era. This reflects the infrastructure-constraint thesis: compute, power, and land are the real bottlenecks now, not software.