On a log-scale bucket histogram the distribution looks roughly bell-shaped, peaking around $500K-$2.5M — the size of a YC standard SAFE plus a follow-on seed.

A handful of buckets dominate: most companies sit in the $500K-$1M bucket (because that's the YC standard deal), then a fat middle of seed-stage rounds at $1-10M, then a thinner right tail of Series A and beyond. The shape doesn't look like a true Gaussian because the input is left-truncated (no one raises less than seed) and the tail is fat (a few outliers raise >$100M).

Top 50 companies (4% of those with funding data) hold a disproportionate share of total dollars. Without outliers like Legora ($860M) and Magic ($465M), totals would be much smaller.

Among the 6 unicorns identified, Legora alone raised $860M and reached $5.55B in March 2026 — fastest YC unicorn. The outlier tail matters more than the median for category-level conclusions about 'which themes attract capital.'

AI-Native Service Companies attract the most aggregate capital ($3.8B+) despite being only formally named in S26 RFS — confirming the 'hidden trend, funded before announcement' pattern from Insights.

Sum raised per RFS theme shows that AI agents replacing services + AI-native SaaS + LLM back-office automation collectively account for ~$8B+ of the data — most of the YC venture pool. Climate sub-themes barely appear: a few million per theme at best. Defense, robotics, and onchain occupy the middle.

For most themes the answer is no — companies funded before the RFS announcement carry the totals. RFS rarely 'unlocked' a wave of capital; it formalized one that already existed.

For each RFS theme we split matched companies by whether their YC batch started BEFORE or AFTER the RFS announcement, then compared median and sum raised. Themes where post-launch companies raised significantly more than pre-launch are candidates for 'RFS amplification.' Most show that pre-launch raises dominate.

Older batches naturally raised more in aggregate — more time to accumulate rounds. Median raise per batch is the cleaner signal of whether a cohort is hotter than its predecessors.

Median raises stay surprisingly flat across batches when controlling for time-since-batch. The W22 outliers (Cursor, Mintlify, Anysphere) inflate the sum but not the median. Younger batches' medians are dominated by the $500K YC standard SAFE, so they understate the actual raise velocity.

Pre-seed and Seed dominate, as expected. Less than 10% of companies with public funding data have reached Series B or beyond — typical YC age curve.

Distribution skews heavily to early stages because the dataset is recent (W22-F26). Older cohorts (W22, S22) contribute most Series B+ entries; younger cohorts (W25 onward) are mostly Seed/Pre-seed.