The hype around artificial intelligence has led to a record year for some types of fundraising.
Silicon Valley AI companies received record funding in 2025, even as investors advised startups to accumulate as much capital as possible ahead of a possible AI crash.
The largest private U.S. companies raised a record $150 billion in 2025, eclipsing the previous high of $92 billion raised in 2021, according to a Financial Times report citing private market data provider PitchBook.
Private investors have allocated most of the capital to the largest artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Companies need an unprecedented amount of startup money as they try to build the expensive infrastructure and hire the influencers that AI needs.
Companies create a cash cushion – also known as balance of strength — to protect yourself from a possible downturn.
Most of the funding went to the largest companies in the largest deals. four best offers amounted to more than 30% of the total transaction amount.
OpenAI raised $40 billion in 2025, the largest private round ever raised by Anthropic. $13 billionElon Musk's xAI raised $10 billion, and Meta acquired data labeling startup Scale AI for nearly $15 billion.
Concentration of capital could be detrimental to the industry, Kyle Stanford, a PitchBook analyst who covers the venture capital industry, wrote in a report.
“The concentration of market value indicates increasing long-term systemic risk for venture capital as this value has proven difficult to realize even as private market values continue to rise and earnings multiples reach unsustainable levels,” he said in the report.
Companies such as SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic could go public as early as 2026.
Several other artificial intelligence companies topped the $2 billion mark for the year, including Project Prometheus and Jeff Bezos' Databricks.
The hype around artificial intelligence has also captured the public market. Nine of the 10 most valuable companies in the world are technology companies riding the artificial intelligence wave. Companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet are now worth more than $3 trillion each.
Productivity gains from AI task automation are starting to take effect early career joband it lit up political reaction against automation. However, the promise of 2026 is based on the wider adoption of “artificial intelligence agents” – systems that can understand users' intentions and autonomously perform tasks such as shopping, planning holidays and making complex decisions – that will become a larger part of the economy.
To make this future a reality, major technology companies are projected to invest more than 500 billion dollars in 2026, build an AI infrastructure, including networks and data centers.
“The risks then are not the potential loss of capital if these companies fail, but the loss to the entire market if the underlying technologies fail to live up to the hype and make a meaningful impact on the economy,” PitchBook's Stanford. wrote.
