US fintech companies raised $16 billion across 445 deals in the second quarter of 2026, the strongest quarter for the sector in the preceding five quarters, according to fintech.global’s funding tracking. That’s a 44% jump from the first quarter of 2026 and a more modest 7% increase year over year against Q2 2025’s $14.9 billion across 430 deals, with deal volume itself up only 3% year over year, meaning essentially all of the funding growth came from larger checks rather than more companies getting funded.
That concentration shows clearly in the deal-size breakdown. Funding for deals under $100 million actually fell, down 17% year over year and down 29% from the first quarter, to $4.3 billion. Deals of $100 million or more, by contrast, jumped 23% year over year to $12 billion, more than double the $5.1 billion those large deals raised in the first quarter alone. The average deal size across the quarter climbed to $36 million, up sharply from $23.8 million in Q1, a pattern that mirrors what’s playing out globally in AI: capital concentrating into fewer, larger, later-stage bets rather than spreading across a broader base of early-stage companies.
The quarter’s single largest deal illustrates where that late-stage capital is actually flowing. NinjaOne, an automated endpoint management platform, raised more than $400 million in a Series C extension at a $12.3 billion valuation, backed by Wellington Management, Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ, NEA, and CapitalG among others. NinjaOne isn’t a consumer fintech brand in the traditional sense, it’s enterprise infrastructure software, with nearly 70% year-over-year growth in 2025 and a base of almost 40,000 customer organizations across 140 countries, underscoring how much of what now gets counted as fintech investment is actually going into the infrastructure and tooling layer underneath financial services rather than into consumer-facing apps.
That infrastructure-over-consumer tilt runs directly counter to what’s happening in wealthtech, a sub-sector that had a genuinely brutal second quarter. Global wealthtech funding dropped 67% year over year, falling to $932 million across 151 deals from $2.8 billion across 137 deals in the same quarter a year earlier, even as overall fintech funding climbed. Fewer deals raising far less money each is a specific signal: investors aren’t just pulling back on wealthtech volume, they’re pulling back on conviction in individual wealthtech bets, a sharp reversal from the retail investing and robo-advisory funding boom that characterized wealthtech through much of the early 2020s.
The bifurcation between a booming late-stage, infrastructure-heavy fintech funding environment and a collapsing wealthtech segment isn’t unique to the US. It echoes the same pattern playing out in Indonesia, where fintech overall remained a top-funded startup category through 2025 even as total fintech funding there collapsed 83% year over year, with the capital that did flow concentrating almost entirely into already-scaled players like Kredivo Group rather than spreading across new entrants. The through-line across both markets is the same one reshaping venture capital more broadly in 2026: investors increasingly want proven, revenue-generating infrastructure and lending platforms with defensible unit economics, not early-stage bets on new consumer financial products, wealth management or otherwise, with unproven paths to profitability.
For Philippine fintech founders courting international capital, the US Q2 data is a fairly blunt signal about what kind of pitch actually lands right now. A consumer-facing app promising to disrupt how Filipinos save or invest, the wealthtech pitch, is fighting for a shrinking pool of capital that’s rapidly losing conviction globally. A lending, payments, or financial infrastructure platform with an already-proven loan book or transaction volume, closer to what Salmon Group or Tonik have built domestically, is fighting for a larger and growing pool of late-stage capital that’s specifically rewarding exactly that kind of proven, infrastructure-heavy business model. The gap between those two funding environments, wealthtech and everything else, was already wide before Q2 2026. It just got a lot wider.
None of this is happening in a vacuum separate from the broader AI-driven reshaping of venture capital either. The same “fewer, larger, later-stage” pattern showing up in US fintech, deal count nearly flat while total dollars jump 44% quarter over quarter, mirrors what’s happened across global startup funding overall in 2026, where AI labs and AI-adjacent infrastructure companies have absorbed an outsized share of all venture dollars raised. NinjaOne’s $400 million round, while not itself an AI company, was still backed by a roster of investors, Sequoia, ICONIQ, NEA, that are simultaneously writing much larger checks into frontier AI labs the same quarter, and the capital discipline those investors are applying to fintech, rewarding proven infrastructure over speculative growth, is the same discipline increasingly shaping every other sector competing for the same pool of late-stage venture dollars.
The practical read for founders anywhere outside the US is that Q2 2026’s headline number, a 44% quarterly jump, overstates how much easier fintech fundraising actually got this year. A company raising its first or second round, the segment that fell 17% year over year even as the market’s total climbed, is fighting a genuinely tougher environment than the topline figure suggests, while a company with a proven, revenue-generating book is fighting a genuinely easier one. That split isn’t a temporary blip tied to one unusually large NinjaOne round either; it’s consistent with the same large-check, fewer-companies pattern showing up in wealthtech’s collapse, in Indonesia’s 83% fintech funding decline concentrating around Kredivo, and in the broader AI-driven reshuffling of where venture capital is willing to take risk in 2026.
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