Michigan led Midwest in Q2 2026 startup funding off just 14 deals.

Michigan startups raised $764.49 million in the second quarter of 2026. That is more than the other six states we cover - Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin - combined and it puts Michigan at the top of the regional table by a comfortable margin for the period. 

Delving deeper to see how it got there. the $764 million came from just 14 deals and one of them - the $650m Series C for Slate Auto, maker of low-cost, highly modular electric pick up trucks which is scheduled to deliver its first model this year - contributes 85% of that amount on its own. In contrast, the Wolverine state closed 26 deals in the first quarter of this year with just $66 million, meaning average deal size climbed from $2.55 million in Q1 to $54.61 million in Q2. For the math-minded amongst you, that made value-per-deal an almost redundant metric as it was 20x the figure of Q1. Like most of the country, the total dollars in Michigan just got bigger.

All of which is important context.

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The quarter-over-quarter line looks spectacular: up 1,052.83% from a very quiet Q1. However year-over-year tells the opposite tale — Michigan is down 65.86% from the $2.24 billion it posted in Q2 2025. Both numbers are real, and both are close to meaningless on their own, because Michigan's Q2 2025 was also an outlier. Nearly three-quarters of everything the state raised in all of 2025 landed in that single quarter, coincidentally also across 14 deals. 

What comes out of the water in Michigan once the snow thaws is anyone’s guess.

Michigan's headline funding figures are therefore a weathervane for mega-deals; one of the anomalies of looking state-by-state and quarter-by-quarter in the Midwest. In the past year of our existence, one large round in Michigan and it tops the Midwest. When it doesn't — see Q1's $66 million — the state goes quiet, although of course founders keep building in that time.

Looking at the total across the country, startup funding followed a familiar pattern from the oast twelve months: the total rose 211.85% year-over-year to $155.67 billion with more than 50% of that going to one company, Anthropic. This also means that in Q2 California alone took $122.78 billion of that national total — 78.87% of the entire US. Strip out the coasts and the picture inverts: every Midwest state, Michigan included, shrank year-over-year. 

None of this is necessarily a bad thing. $764 million is real money reaching Michigan companies, and a state that can pull in large, late-stage rounds is a state doing something right. Detroit and Ann Arbor have spent years trying to become places where a nine-figure round is plausible rather than remarkable and the increasing regularity of such outsized funding in the state is evidence that that effort does make a difference within the right categories.

But just like in 2025, the figure to watch isn't necessarily a big $ deal. Instead its deal count — 14 this quarter, down from 26 in the last, in a state and region prone to swinging from quarter to quarter. Deal count simply demonstrates how many companies are getting funded at all, and in Michigan that number is small enough that one single funding decision can shift the entire state's relative ‘health’. 

Read the Q2 funding reports for the other states here:
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Illinois

Ohio

Minnesota

Wisconsin

Indiana

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