Michigan startups raised $147.2 million across 12 venture rounds in the third quarter of 2026, according to preliminary Dealroom data we've tracked up to October 9. That is down 81.5% on the $795.7 million Dealroom now shows for Q2, when Slate Auto's $650 million Series C made Michigan the region's leader, and 15.7% below the $174.7 million Dealroom records for Q3 2025. This quarter leaves Michigan fourth among the six Midwest states on both dollars and deal count, behind Ohio, Illinois and Minnesota, with just 7.1% of the $2.06 billion raised across the region.
One round is 84% of the total. Sling Therapeutics, the Ann Arbor biopharmaceutical company developing linsitinib, an oral small-molecule therapy for thyroid eye disease, closed a $123 million Series C in September. The company said at the time that the funds would support continued clinical development. The round was the third-largest in the Midwest for the quarter, behind Keyfactor's $1 billion in Ohio and Niron Magnetics' conditional $150 million commitment in Minnesota.
Without Sling, Michigan raised $24.2 million across 11 rounds, of which only four carried a disclosed amount. For comparison, the state raised $66 million across 26 rounds in Q1 2026, more than twice the ex-Sling figure on more than twice the number of deals.
This is the third time in six quarters that a single Michigan company has supplied most of the state's figure: Slate Auto in Q2 2026, and before that Acrisure in Q2 2025, a quarter that carried nearly three-quarters of everything the state raised in 2025; Our Q2 report described the state's headline number as a weathervane for mega-deals.
Nationally, Crunchbase put global venture funding at $159 billion for the quarter, with $91 billion going to startups in the US for their 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, Michigan's $147.2 million is 0.16% of the national quarter.
The 11 rounds beneath Sling
NxLite, the Detroit maker of low-emissivity coatings for glass and polymer, raised the largest of the remaining rounds. Dealroom records it as a $13.1 million Series A in July; StartMidwest's weekly roundup for the week ending July 17 reported $16.6 million from the company's announcement. The company also raised $9.2 million in 2025.
CleanBotix raised $6 million in an early-stage round in August. Grounded, the Detroit company building modular electric vehicles and expanding into a new 50,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, raised a $5 million seed the same month. Sequestro added a $100,000 seed in July.
Seven Michigan rounds came without a disclosed amount in Dealroom: Akadeum Life Sciences and Deon Health (both late-stage, August), Centroid Systems (growth equity, July), Blue Arbor Technologies and M3D (early-stage), Capitan Orthopedics (seed, August) and Verge (angel, July). Capitan, the Grand Rapids developer of an orthopedic implant platform for shoulder surgery, had an oversubscribed $4.1 million seed in our weekly roundup.
By stage, four of the 12 rounds were seed or angel, three early-stage, two late-stage, one growth equity, one Series A and one Series C. By month, July brought five rounds and $13.2 million, August six rounds and $11 million, and September a single round, Sling's.
What Q3 startup funding in Michigan does not include
StartMidwest's weekly roundups between the weeks ending July 17 and September 25 reported $151.0 million across six Michigan deals, slightly more than Dealroom's venture total on half the number of deals. The two counts differ in three places. The weeklies carried NxLite at $16.6 million and Capitan at $4.1 million, where Dealroom has $13.1 million for the former and no figure for the latter. They also included Marel Power Solutions' $1.9 million raise in Detroit and Common Vector Robotics' $425,000 PitchMI award, which Dealroom's venture definition leaves out as non-dilutive. We decided not to carry each PitchMI award in the weeklies. Dealroom lists seven undisclosed Michigan rounds the weekly desk did not catch.
Using the weeklies' figures for NxLite and Capitan would put Michigan at $154.8 million. StartMidwest has kept the Dealroom figure for consistency with the regional report, and the $147.2 million should be read as a preliminary indication rather than a final number. Dealroom's own figures for Q2 2026 and Q3 2025 have also shifted since those reports were published: the Q2 report ran at $764.49 million across 14 deals and Dealroom now shows $795.7 million across 16; the Q3 2025 report ran at $141 million and Dealroom now shows $174.7 million. Against the figures as published, Michigan is down 80.7% on Q2 and up 4.4% on Q3 2025. The full methodology is set out in the regional report linked above.
Michigan in 2026 so far
On the figures we have published for each quarter, Michigan startups have raised $977.7 million in the first nine months of 2026: $66 million in Q1, $764.49 million in Q2 and $147.2 million in Q3. Slate Auto alone is two-thirds of that total, and Slate Auto and Sling together are 79% of it.
Deal count has fallen each quarter: 26 in Q1, 14 in Q2 and 12 in Q3, the lowest of the three. On Dealroom's venture basis the 12 rounds sit below both the 16 it records for Q2 and the 14 for Q3 2025. The average disclosed round was $29.4 million including Sling and $6.05 million without it, against $54.61 million in Q2 and $2.55 million in Q1.
The Q3 2025 report noted that Michigan's quarters swing on whether a single large round lands. In 2026 one has landed in each of the last two quarters
All the companies named here can be found in Start Midwest's startups and investors database.
