Venture capitalists gobbles term sheets for startups that exercise artificial intelligence, but when it comes to funding a wider range of technology, they’re doing fussy things.
According to new figures from Analytics Firm Dealroom, the AI startup raised $110 billion last year. At the same time, private companies across the technology spectrum (startups and scale-ups) raised $227 billion in 2024, down 12% from 2023.
Dealroom founder Yoram Wijngaarde has been analyzing and counselling in the tech industry for decades. Marketplace had a barnstorming moment in the late 1990s and early 2000s in terms of investor attention, but nothing came to the impact AI had on investments in terms of activity and value. . “This is the biggest wave of history from investing absolute amounts,” he said. “There was no such thing.”
Part of the reason seems to be the fact that there is a wider ecosystem touched on by AI, covering hardware and infrastructure, applications, underlying models, and more.
The list of the biggest AI funding rounds of 2024 speaks to a variety of areas that are attracting attention. Humanity (large-scale language models, generation AI), Waymo (self-driving), Anduril (defense), Xai (applications), Databricks (data processing and management, especially AI data), and Vantage (data centers and infrastructure) It was one of the top ones – the biggest fundraiser of 2024.
Openai now feels like a kid on AI posters, but last year he didn’t raise much of his money. The spot was filmed by Databricks, who raised $10 billion compared to Openai’s $6.6 billion.
But the most funds are total, with more than $20 billion and another $40 billion reportedly in the work so far. Openai, a viral app in the form of ChatGpt, has also become a representative of the industry’s pioneer.
Naturally, its two biggest business interests, the basic model and generation AI, will raise $47.4 billion in 2024, and the generation AI company will drive all VC activity, with the basic AI technology being the most Overcoming growing AI applications (and appear to overtake giant slices; funding over the past two years).
The dealroom report was asked to match a weekly AI event in Paris around the French government’s AI Action Summit. Part of the event agenda focuses on the issue of how to advocate for fairer AI development in more markets beyond the US
For those who believe AI companies are supported outside of their marketplace, Dealroom figures bare how it works. 42% ($80.7 billion) of US-procured venture capital companies were promoted to AI startups last year, just 25% ($12.8 billion) in Europe and 18% worldwide. China was outstanding last year with a $7.6 billion investment.
“In Europe there’s a bit of an innovator’s dilemma,” says Wijngaarde. “We don’t want to replace what we have. It could be a non-aggressive position.”
How will AI funding be made in 2024 in 2025?
One of the reasons why AI startups have raised so much money is the cost of building and operating these services. Large language models are expensive to build and run infrastructure. The emergence of Deepseek and other projects – we built a rival to the Openai model for just $50, but present an alternative approach built into open source. Is that something we will develop further in the future?
So far, the outlook for open source companies has been rather modest, counting Meta’s efforts in the space of mistrals (open source and billing) and meta in Europe.
According to Dealroom, about 12% of AI VC funding went to an open source AI construction startup last year. “But there’s a fair amount of grey territory in whether it’s considered open source,” Orla Browne, head of that insight, told me. “For example, Xai is not included in these numbers. GROK-1 is open source, so GROK-2 is not currently. If you include only Xai, the percentage will rise to 22%.”
As for VC companies, Dealroom has found Antler has invested the most in the sector last year, with A16Z, General Catalyst, Sequoia and Khosla Ventures closing in the top five.
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