Midwest startups raised $2.06 billion across 82 venture rounds in the third quarter of 2026, according to preliminary Dealroom data as of October 9. On a like-for-like basis that is up more than 70% on the $1.27 billion in Q2, and close to the $1.27 billion we shared on these pages for Q3 2025. It is the region's largest dollar quarter since the $3.7 billion of Q2 2025 when we began reporting, and deserves additional context.
The reason? Keyfactor.
The Independence, Ohio machine-identity and trust-infrastructure company announced a $1 billion-plus strategic growth investment led by Summit Partners on July 6, with Insight Partners and Sixth Street Growth maintaining significant stakes. That single deal is 49% of everything the six states we cover in the Midwest raised between July and September this year. Remove Keyfactor and the region raised $1.06 billion across 81 rounds. In other words, without it, this was an ordinary quarter by the standard of the last four. With it, the region posted its biggest number in more than a year.
Just another quarter in the Midwest, eh?
If you’re a regular reader or involved directly in this space and with solid knowledge of the landscape, you’ll note the similarity with the Slate Auto story from last quarter - and Acrisure from Q2 2025 - with only the state in question changing in each case. In other words, for two consecutive quarters, one Midwest company has delivered around half of the region's total, with the five largest rounds delivering 69.9% of the quarter between them. The region's number is increasingly a function of whether somebody, somewhere between Cincinnati in the south and Minneapolis in the north, lands a nine- or ten-figure check. In Q2 of this year and in 2025 it was Michigan. This quarter it is Ohio.
Nationally, Crunchbase put global venture funding at $159 billion for Q3 2026, down 25% from a record $212 billion theory reported in Q2 but up 53% on a year earlier, with $91 billion of it going to US startups according to their preliminary reporting. Twenty-seven companies raised a billion dollars or more in the quarter, the most ever in a three-month span, and the largest rounds, a monster $30 billion for Open AI, with $5 billion each for Databricks and Safe Superintelligence, were all on the west coast. The Bay Area alone took 24% of every venture dollar raised on the planet, roughly $38 billion, while AI companies took 64% of the global total. Set against the $91 billion American figure, the Midwest's $2.06 billion is a 2.3% share of the national quarter, and 1.2% without Keyfactor. That is better than the sub-1% share we reported in Q2, but a shift like that is not necessarily a trend back to the previous norms, and we’d rather say that categorically than be guilty of outlandish boosterism.
Why the quarter total differs from our weekly count
Readers who follow our weekly roundups may notice that these figures do not match with what those posts will add up to. Across the eleven weekly reports from the week ending July 17 to the week ending September 25, we tracked $960.7 million across 51 deals. The gap is worth explaining, because it tells you something about how we track deals and also how any regional funding number gets made.
The largest single piece of the gap is Keyfactor. The round was announced on July 6, and our weekly series started with the week ending July 17, so the biggest Midwest deal of the year fell into the ten days before we altered our reporting. It is an honest miss (if you can even call it that), and is the clearest argument we can make for why a data partner like Dealroom matters: a weekly watchlist catches what is publicly announced, while the database will spot what is filed, then verified and re-dated weeks later. As our friend - and excellent documenter of these deals - J.D. Davids of Smart Money group pointed out to us recently, Pitchbook has come to call their regular updates ‘preliminary dealcount’ while adding a dotted line to their estimated figures. The weeklies also run with narrower coverage. Dealroom logs 32 of the quarter's 82 rounds without a dollar figure, most of them seed and early-stage; and our weekly reports tend to catch only a handful of those.
Dealroom's venture basis also excludes most grants, pitch awards and government money, so the Kovina Therapeutics NCI grant and the Common Vector Robotics PitchMI award from our September roundups are not in the $2.06 billion. We also listed Gravie, the Minneapolis health benefits company, with a $463 million growth equity round in August. That figure is the company's total funding to date, not the round; Dealroom's own company page put Gravie's prior total at $432.6 million, so we carry the difference, $30.4 million, as the new funding. It is also worth mentioning Resilience, the biopharma manufacturer that recently moved its headquarters from California to Blue Ash, Ohio, with a $750 million growth equity round in July. That figure was the capital investment Resilience and Eli Lilly announced for manufacturing capacity in West Chester and Blue Ash, with at least 400 jobs attached. That’s great news for Cincinnati, but is not a startup raising venture capital. With it, Ohio's quarter would be $1.86 billion and the region's $2.81 billion.
Essentially, we view our two types of reports as serving distinct purposes: the weekly is to report most any funding that has been announced that week, in one single compendium. Funds, Grants, large PE in an innovative business… it’s all new, fresh capital that is worth being made aware of. The what, how and why are included in those reports for the same reason.
The quarterly reports are about trends, and so deserve tighter measurement. That’s because we hope to see trends over time that tell us where our cities and states are headed. Indeed, Dealroom's own figures for Q2 2026 and Q3 2025 have already shifted since we published those reports.
The checks got bigger. The region isn’t busier.
Deal count tells a different story than dollars and as investment capital shifts and venture capital evolves, it is the metric we pay closest attention to. For venture deals, the Midwest closed 82 rounds against 78 in Q2 and 95 in Q3 2025, so activity is roughly flat in comparison. The Dealroom count of all investment in Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin which takes in debt, grants, buyouts and acquisitions, came in at 132 for the quarter against 130 in Q2, which is as close to flat as a trend can get.
What did change was size. The average Midwest round was $25.2 million, or $13.1 million without Keyfactor, against the $11.1 million we reported for Q2. Seven rounds reached $50 million or more this quarter, where Dealroom shows four for Q2 and six for Q3 2025. The seed and angel layer, meanwhile, carried on as before: 29 of the 82 rounds were seed or angel, and the 21 of those with a disclosed figure came to $116.1 million between them.
Top 10 Midwest rounds of Q3 2026
Niron's figure is the conditional $150 million government commitment we carried in September; Dealroom lists the round without an amount, so we have kept our number and labeled it. Illinois and Minnesota have four of the ten apiece.
State by state
Ohio — $1,109.7M, 17 deals
The Buckeye State led the Midwest by a distance it has not managed in any or reports before, on 17 rounds, the second-most this quarter. Keyfactor is 90% of the total. Without it, Ohio raised $109.7 million across 16 rounds, which is still close to double the $57.5 million Dealroom shows for Q2 and ends the run of steep declines we have been reporting on the state for a year. The depth was real: Stack Health's $21 million seed, $15 million a piece for 1872AI and SonicFireTech, and Series A rounds for Healia ($14 million), RWX ($12million), Harmoni ($10 million) and Payload ($9 million). Our weekly roundups had Ohio at $105.1 million across 11 deals, so once Keyfactor is accounted for the two sources agree on the state almost to the dollar. Year over year, Ohio is up 361.6% on Dealroom's $240.4 million for Q3 2025.
Illinois — $431.4M, 27 deals
Illinois did what Illinois does, leading the region on deal count with 27 rounds, and this time the dollars mostly followed. The state's $431.4 million is up 133.1% on Q2 and within 4% of its Q3 2025 figure, and it got there without a single round doing most of the work, something which no other state in the region can say this quarter. The state supplied four of the top ten this period, with three of them from Chicago: CADDi's $114 million Series D, Go.AI's $85 million Series A, Hopscotch Health's $53 million Series D and Impossible Objects' $40 million Series B, followed by Patientiq's $30 million Series C and $25 million each for Fly.io and Empirical Security. Empirical's Series A is worth a note for anyone tracking the pipeline: it raised a $12 million seed round in Q3 2025, and a year later has doubled that. Illinois' average disclosed round was $27.0 million, against the $5.68 million we reported in Q2. Eleven of the 27 rounds came without a figure.
Minnesota — $310.3M, 13 deals
Minnesota posted its best quarter in the last year on the back of 13 rounds, and as we’ve come to expect from the state it is unusually healthy: no single round above half the total, and five at $30 million or more. Niron Magnetics' conditional $150 million government debt commitment leads, then Claros Technologies' $55 million Series B, ReEmerge's $37 million Series A, Gravie's $30.4 million of new growth money and Yardstik's $30 million Series B. On that basis the state is up 153.5% on Q2 and close to six times its Q3 2025 figure of $53.6 million. The weekly roundups had Minneapolis and the rest of the state at $274.7 million across ten deals.
Michigan — $147.2M, 12 deals
The quarter after Slate Auto made Michigan the region's leader, the state is down 81.5% on Q2 and 15.7% on Q3 2025. Sling Therapeutics' $123 million Series C in Ann Arbor is 84% of the state's total, so Michigan has now had two consecutive quarters - and three over the last five - in which one company was most of the number. NxLite's $13.1 million Series A, CleanBotix's $6 million and Grounded's $5 million seed make up most of the rest, while seven of the twelve rounds came without a figure. Our weeklies had Michigan at $151.0 million across six deals.
Wisconsin — $37.8M, 8 deals
Wisconsin is up 89% on Q2 and 52.4% on Q3 2025 on a venture basis, with the number almost entirely made of venture rounds, which was not the case in Q2, when Spectrum Brands' $67 million convertible note was three-quarters of the state's published $87 million. Rentable's $25 million Series C in Madison leads, with N-Zyme Biomedical's $4.6 million Series A and a run of seed rounds under $2.5 million (Axio BioPharma, Estrigenix Therapeutics, Dirac Labs, retham technologies) behind. The average disclosed round was $5.4 million, the smallest in the region, and the weeklies had the state at $39.9 million across seven deals, so the two sources essentially agree.
Indiana — $26.0M, 5 deals
Indiana closed the quarter trailing its neighbors on both dollars and deals, down 19.8% on Q2 and 59.9% on Q3 2025, while the venture count of five rounds is half of Q2's ten. Earlier in the quarter, our contributor Drew Beechler called the previous quarter a ‘canary in the coalmine moment’, and at this point his words appear to be prescient. Intalus' $20 million seed was most of the state's figure and Overfuel's $6 million growth round is the rest of the disclosed total; AlloDirect, Athian and Pluto Aerospace raised undisclosed amounts. This is the one state where our weekly roundups came in higher than Dealroom, at $33.3 million across four deals, because the weeklies counted non-dilutive money such as Kovina Therapeutics' $2.3 million National Cancer Institute grant in Indianapolis that our quarterly venture lens leaves out.
What to watch out for in Q4
The question we ended with in Q2 was whether growth capital would find our region in this period of increasingly centralized capital flows. The question this quarter is whether that can happen again when there isn’t a single billion dollar check; one outlier a quarter shouldn’t be what it takes to make the region respectable, because it means our future is potentially being decided outside our local capitals.
