Illinois startups raised $431.4 million across 27 venture rounds in the third quarter of 2026, according to preliminary Dealroom data as of October 9. The state closed more rounds than any other in the Midwest for the second quarter running, ten ahead of Ohio's 17, and finished second on dollars behind Ohio's Keyfactor-driven $1.11 billion, with 20.9% of the $2.06 billion raised across the region.
On Dealroom's venture basis the total is up 133.1% on the $185.1 million it shows for Q2 and 3.7% below the $448.0 million it records for Q3 2025. Against the figures StartMidwest published at the time, Illinois is up 90.6% on the $226.33 million across 41 deals reported for Q2 and 20.4% above the $358.2 million reported for Q3 2025.
Illinois and Minnesota were the only two of the six states whose quarter was not mostly one round. CADDi's $114 million Series D is the largest Illinois round of the period at 26% of the total; in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana the leading round was between 66% and 90% of the state's figure. The five largest Illinois rounds together were $322 million, or 74.6% of the quarter, against 78.7% for the top five a year earlier.
Nationally, Crunchbase put global venture funding at $159 billion for the quarter, with $91 billion going to US startups in its preliminary count. Twenty-seven companies raised a billion dollars or more, a record for a single quarter, led by OpenAI's $30 billion and $5 billion apiece for Databricks and Safe Superintelligence, all on the West Coast. The Bay Area took 24% of every venture dollar raised globally, roughly $38 billion. Against the $91 billion American figure, Illinois' $431.4 million is 0.47% of the national quarter.
Eleven rounds at Series B or later
Sixteen of the 27 rounds carried a disclosed amount. CADDi, the Chicago-headquartered manufacturing data platform, closed its $114 million Series D in September at a valuation the company put at $1.2 billion. Go.AI, which sells on-premises AI hardware and software to regulated industries, raised an $85 million Series A the same month, the largest Series A in the Midwest for the quarter.
Hopscotch Health, the Chicago provider of technology-enabled primary care to rural patients, raised a $53 million Series D in August. Impossible Objects of Northbrook raised a $40 million Series B in September, led by Inflection Equity with Aaron Wealth Management, OCA Ventures, Impact Capital and Excell Partners, for its composite-based industrial 3D printers. Patientiq raised a $30 million Series C in September.
Two $25 million rounds closed in July. Empirical Security, the Chicago cybersecurity company building predictive models for exposure management, raised a $25 million Series A, a year after a $12 million seed in Q3 2025. Fly.io, the Chicago cloud platform, is recorded by Dealroom with a $25 million Series D; StartMidwest's weekly roundup for the same week carried the company's raise at $2 million, and the two figures have not been reconciled. InvestiFi, which provides embedded investing for credit unions and community banks, raised $20 million.
Below $20 million: Nara Health, the Chicago AI-native health-benefits platform, raised a $14 million seed in September; Antares Labs $7.3 million and Intragel $7 million; Photon Queue $4 million; Concorda of Kildeer a $3.8 million seed led by Sazze Partners, with Andreessen Horowitz's a16z speedrun among the participants; NovaScan $3.1 million; and Cohesion and Rise Reforming $100,000 each.
Eleven Illinois companies raised undisclosed amounts. Five were growth equity rounds, for GoCharting, PartsSource, PeopleVine, Phigenics of Warrenville and XBE; Sabanto raised a Series B; CAEPlus and OG.com early-stage rounds; and Air Energy, FutureSports and Rising Tide seed rounds.
By stage, nine of the 27 rounds were seed, worth $29.3 million where disclosed, and five were early-stage venture. Eleven were Series B or later or growth equity, and the three Series D rounds alone, CADDi, Hopscotch and Fly.io, were $192 million. The average disclosed round was $27.0 million, against the $5.52 million StartMidwest reported for Q2.
The quarter was back-loaded. July brought nine rounds and $81.3 million, August six rounds and $63.1 million, and September 12 rounds and $287.0 million, two-thirds of the quarter's dollars in its final month.
Where the weekly count and Dealroom disagree
StartMidwest's weekly roundups between the weeks ending July 17 and September 25 reported $356.8 million across 13 Illinois deals. Dealroom's venture count is $74.6 million and 14 rounds higher. Most of the extra rounds are undisclosed, but five carry figures the weeklies did not: Patientiq ($30 million), Antares Labs ($7.3 million), Intragel ($7 million), Photon Queue ($4 million) and NovaScan ($3.1 million), together $51.4 million. The Fly.io discrepancy accounts for a further $23 million.
In the other direction, the weeklies covered two Illinois items that are not in the venture total. Adams Street Partners' $5 billion in secondary fund commitments, reported in the week ending August 7, is a fund close rather than a company raise and is excluded from both counts, as it was from the regional report. Aligned Modern Health's majority growth investment from Arcventis Health Partners, undisclosed, is a control transaction that Dealroom's venture definition does not include.
StartMidwest has kept the Dealroom figure for consistency with the regional report, and the $431.4 million should be read as a preliminary indication rather than a final number. Dealroom's figures for earlier quarters have also moved: its Q3 2025 total for Illinois now stands at $448.0 million across 34 rounds against the $358.2 million across 24 published at the time, and its Q2 2026 count of 27 rounds sits below the 41 the Q2 report counted, because that report included grants and awards that a strict venture definition leaves out. The full methodology is set out in the regional report linked above.
Illinois in 2026 so far
On the figures StartMidwest has published for each quarter, Illinois startups have raised $1.11 billion in the first nine months of 2026: $457 million in Q1, $226.33 million in Q2 and $431.4 million in Q3. That is second among the six states to Ohio's $1.26 billion, a figure that is $262 million without Keyfactor, and ahead of Michigan's $978 million. It compares with $924 million for Q1 2025 alone, when the state's year opened with Nerdio's $500 million.
Illinois has led the Midwest on deal count in each of the last two quarters: 41 rounds in Q2 and 27 in Q3 on the figures published at the time, or 27 in each on Dealroom's venture basis, after 32 in Q1. What changed in Q3 was the size of the rounds. The Q2 report noted that Illinois had done nearly three times Michigan's deals for less than a third of Michigan's money, and that the state's largest round of the previous 18 months, Nerdio's $500 million in Q1 2025, was double the next largest. CADDi's $114 million is bigger than any Illinois round in Q2 2026 or in Q3 2025, when ZeroHash's $104 million Series D led the state, and the quarter produced seven rounds of $25 million or more.
Fintech, which accounted for more than half of Illinois' Q3 2025 total, was a smaller part of the mix this time, with InvestiFi's $20 million the largest fintech round. Manufacturing technology (CADDi, Impossible Objects), AI infrastructure (Go.AI), healthtech (Hopscotch, Nara Health, Patientiq) and cybersecurity (Empirical) supplied the quarter's largest rounds.
The companies and investors named here can be found in StartMidwest's startups and investors database. StartMidwest's Q3 2026 state reports are being published in sequence, beginning with Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin; Indiana and Minnesota will be linked here as they go live.
