Artificial intelligence captured nearly half of all global funding to start-ups in 2025, up from 34 percent in 2024, according to newly released data from Crunchbase. A total of $202.3 billion has been invested in the AI sector so far this year across the entire tech stack, from AI infrastructure to foundation labs and applications.
In total, funding to AI rose more than 75 percent year-on-year from the $114 billion invested last year. Moreover, 2025 is the first year where funding to AI start-ups was virtually at par with the rest of start-up funding, which totaled $203 billion as of December 14. Last year, funding to non-AI-related start-ups was just shy of $100 billion higher than funding to AI start-ups.
Foundation model companies have raised $80 billion in 2025 to date, accounting for 40 percent of global AI funding, Crunchbase data shows. Model company funding this year has more than doubled from $31 billion in 2024, when that investment represented about 27 percent of all AI funding.
The two largest foundation companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, alone bagged 14 percent of global venture investment this year.
One trend to watch in 2026 is whether the leading model developers will continue to raise tens of billions through equity investment to address their voracious appetite for compute in 2026, or partnerships will meet that gap, Crunchbase said.
The hyperscalers have committed an estimated more than $300 billion to capex in 2025 and have increased that investment commitment for 2026.
US companies at the forefront
The US has dominated AI funding. A total of $159 billion (79 percent of funding) to the sector has gone to US-based companies this year. The San Francisco Bay Area raised $122 billion of that, which accounts for more than three-quarters of AI funding nationwide.
Several corporate investors, including Meta, SpaceX, Nvidia, Intercontinental Exchange, ASML, the Walt Disney Company and Google, have led billion-dollar rounds in AI companies this year, according to the Crunchbase data.
After Meta led a $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, about 10 key team members left the start-up to join Meta, including CEO Alexandr Wang. Scale AI’s platform provides training and validation data for AI applications.
Although corporates led the largest number of billion-dollar AI funding deals in 2025, private equity and other alternative asset investors dominated in leading deals for the biggest amounts in AI-related companies. SoftBank led the single largest deal with a $40 billion investment in OpenAI. A total of $63 billion of investment across roughly 300 rounds was led by a single lead private equity firm in rounds of $1 million or more this year.
Venture capital firms led rounds totaling $38 billion in deals with a sole lead investor across 1,600 fundings of $1 million or more. Despite the smaller number of billion-dollar rounds, VCs were the driver of this asset class, leading 75 percent of the deals analyzed, said Crunchbase. Billion-dollar deals were led by three VC firms: Lightspeed Venture Partners, which announced the closing of over $9 billion across six funds this week, Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz.
AI-related companies also represented the bulk of larger funding rounds in 2025, with 58 percent of funding going to mega-rounds of $500 million or more.
Enterprise AI revenue reached $37 billion this year, up more than 3x year-on-year, with $19 billion in user-facing products and $18 billion in AI infrastructure, according to Menlo Ventures’ recent generative AI report.
AI-related funding drove growth in global venture capital, which followed slower funding in 2024 and 2023, with capital concentrating in the largest start-ups.
