Wisconsin startups raised $37.8 million across eight venture rounds in the third quarter of 2026, according to preliminary Dealroom data as of October 22.
On Dealroom's venture basis that is up 89% on the $20.0 million it shows for Q2 and 52.4% above the $24.8 million it records for Q3 2025. Against the figures StartMidwest published at the time, the picture is different: the Q2 2026 report ran at $87 million across 12 deals, three-quarters of it Spectrum Brands' $67 million convertible note, and the Q3 2025 report at $18 million, the state's lowest quarter in roughly a decade. Measured against those, Wisconsin is down 57% on Q2 and has more than doubled year over year.
The quarter leaves Wisconsin fifth among the six Midwest states on both dollars and deals, ahead of Indiana, with 1.8% of the $2.06 billion raised across the region.
Two-thirds of the figure is in one round. Rentable, the Madison company whose ApartmentIQ platform provides market intelligence, revenue management and marketing tools for multifamily operators, raised $25 million in August. Dealroom records the round as a Series C; the company's announcement, as carried in Start Midwest's weekly roundup, gave the amount without a stage and did not name a lead investor or valuation. Without Rentable, Wisconsin raised $12.8 million across seven rounds, six of them with a disclosed figure.
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, Wisconsin's $37.8 million is 0.04% of the national quarter.
Seven rounds beneath Rentable, five of them seed
N-Zyme Biomedical, the Milwaukee company developing pepsin-targeting therapies for reflux disease, raised the quarter's second-largest round, a $4.6 million Series A in July. Estrigenix Therapeutics, also in Milwaukee, closed a $2 million seed the same month to advance pre-clinical work on estrogen-receptor-beta therapeutics for women's health and neurodegenerative disease.
Three more seed rounds followed in August and September. Dirac Labs in Madison raised $1.8 million for quantum-enabled navigation sensors built on diamond-based magnetometers, for use where GPS is unavailable. Retham Technologies, in Wauwatosa in greater Milwaukee, raised $1.5 million for its platelet-based diagnostic assays while Axio BioPharma raised $2.4 million in September, a round that did not appear in our weekly roundups, possibly due to the timing of announcements.
Five of the eight rounds were seed, worth $8.2 million between them, two were Series A and one Series C. N-Zyme, Estrigenix and Retham are life-sciences businesses, which with Dirac Labs' quantum sensing gives the quarter a deep-tech tilt that the Q2 total, built on a consumer-products note, did not have.
The average disclosed round was $5.4 million, the smallest of the six Midwest states, against the $7.25 million StartMidwest reported for Q2, a figure that Spectrum Brands' note lifted on its own.
Where our weekly count and Dealroom misalign
StartMidwest's weekly roundups between the weeks ending July 17 and September 25 reported $39.9 million across seven Wisconsin deals, close to Dealroom's total but built from a different list. The weeklies carried two rounds Dealroom does not record for the state: Quercus Biosolutions' $5 million in August, for AI-designed mini-protein crop protectants, and an undisclosed raise by Rock River Laboratory, the Watertown agricultural testing business, in July. Dealroom, in turn, lists Axio BioPharma and Vantus, which the weekly desk did not catch. Combining the two sources would put Wisconsin at $42.8 million across ten rounds.
StartMidwest has kept the Dealroom figure for consistency with the regional report, and the $37.8 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 Wisconsin now stands at $24.8 million across nine rounds against the $18 million published at the time, and its Q2 2026 venture count of three rounds sits well below the 12 deals the Q2 report counted, because that report included grants, awards and the Spectrum Brands note that a strict venture definition leaves out. The full methodology is set out in the regional report linked above.
Wisconsin in 2026 so far
On the figures StartMidwest has published for each quarter, Wisconsin startups have raised $388.8 million in the first nine months of 2026: $264 million in Q1, $87 million in Q2 and $37.8 million in Q3. The first quarter is 68% of that total, and each quarter since has been smaller than the previous.
Deal count on Dealroom's venture basis has gone the other way, from three rounds in Q2 to eight in Q3, close to the nine it records for Q3 2025. The Q2 report argued that the deal count mattered more than the dollar figure for a state of Wisconsin's size; on that measure Q3 was the better quarter of the two, even as the headline number fell by more than half.
The companies named here can be found in StartMidwest's startups and investors database.
