AI ate most of this year's venture funding. Biotech held its ground anyway.
Global funding to biotech startups has hovered between $36 billion and $40 billion for the past several years. Crunchbase data shows 2026 on track to stay close to that same range.
Biotech's Steady Line Through an AI-Dominated Year
Overall venture investment hit a record level in the first half of 2026. Much of that windfall went to a handful of generative AI giants.
Biotech still captured a respectable share of what was left. More than $6 billion has gone specifically to AI-focused biotechs so far this year, according to Crunchbase.
The largest biotech round of the year was a $2.1 billion Series B for London-based Isomorphic Labs. It's an AI-first drug design company. Delaware's Earendil Labs raised $787 million in March for AI-driven protein therapeutics.
Early-Stage Money Still Dominates
Seed and early-stage rounds make up more than half of all biotech investment and most deal counts this year. That pattern has held for several years running.
A fair share of biotechs also went public unusually early in their lifecycle. Kailera Therapeutics, founded in 2024, listed in April, just six months after closing its Series B.
Personalized medicine startup Kardigan followed a similar path. It debuted on Nasdaq in June after raising more than $550 million in early-stage funding the year before.
Where Miami's Own Cancer Research Fits In
The University of Miami's Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center is riding a version of this same AI wave. It's funded through research grants rather than venture rounds.
Sylvester recently secured a $762,427 National Institutes of Health grant to build a new AI computing platform. The system runs on NVIDIA H200 hardware.
"The most exciting aspect of this award is that it supports an entire research community," said Dr. Yan Guo, who directs Sylvester's Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Shared Resource and will lead the platform's rollout.
The system is designed to uncover patterns across genomic, clinical and molecular datasets that could advance precision medicine. Sylvester separately runs digital drug discovery work under Dr. Stephan Schürer, who directs that program at UM's Institute for Data Science and Computing.
Big Exits Are Still Happening Too
Biotech isn't just an early-stage story this year. At least 12 funded biotech companies sold in deals worth $1 billion or more, including potential milestone payments, per Crunchbase.
The year's largest biotech IPO came from 10-year-old Parabilis Medicines, a cancer therapeutics company. It raised its Series F in January before going public.
What Steady Funding Actually Signals
Biotech's funding pattern this year isn't a boom story. It's closer to resilience, a sector that kept raising money even while AI absorbed most of the headlines and the capital.
For Miami's own research institutions, that steadiness matters more than any single funding record. Sylvester's new AI platform is a bet the same discipline will keep paying off for South Florida's own patients.
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