AI Funding Concentration

Venture capital just had its biggest quarter on record, and it still got narrower. Crunchbase says startups raised $300 billion globally in the first quarter of 2026, but four companies alone took $188 billion of it. (crunchbase.com) Those four were OpenAI at $122 billion, Anthropic at $30 billion, xAI at $20 billion, and Waymo at $16 billion. Together they absorbed about 65% of all venture money raised worldwide in the quarter. (crunchbase.com) Artificial intelligence swallowed almost everything else around them. Crunchbase puts artificial intelligence funding at $242 billion in the quarter, or 80% of all global venture dollars. (crunchbase.com) This is not a normal boom where money spreads across thousands of young companies. Crunchbase says late-stage funding hit $246.6 billion across 584 deals, which means the surge came from giant checks to a small number of already-famous names. (crunchbase.com) The United States pulled even more of the map toward itself. U.S.-based companies raised $250 billion in the quarter, which was 83% of global venture funding, while China was second at $16.1 billion and the United Kingdom was third at $7.4 billion. (crunchbase.com) North America looked even more extreme than the global picture. Crunchbase says U.S. and Canadian startups raised $252.6 billion in the quarter, and more than 87% of that went to companies in artificial intelligence-related categories. (crunchbase.com) Early-stage investing is splitting into two different markets. Crunchbase says more than 40% of all seed and Series A money in 2026 has gone into rounds of $100 million or more, which used to be almost unheard of at those stages. (crunchbase.com) That is why “seed” now often means two opposite things at once. One lane is a classic first round under $5 million, and the other lane is a giant artificial intelligence bet like Humans& raising a $480 million seed round or Merge Labs reportedly raising $252 million at seed. (crunchbase.com) The squeeze shows up in deal counts before it shows up in headlines. Carta says the number of seed rounds on its platform fell 28% year over year in the first quarter of 2025 even as median seed valuations rose, and Crunchbase says smaller U.S. seed deals from $200,000 to under $5 million were down roughly 20% in 2025 while rounds above $10 million grew. (carta.com) (crunchbase.com) So founders are being asked to look less like experiments and more like finished businesses. TechCrunch reported in March that many Y Combinator companies were already showing six- to seven-figure customer contracts, and investors were backing rounds at $40 million post-money valuations partly because they were pricing companies “years ahead of traction.” (techcrunch.com) By the time those companies reach Series A, the bar is higher again. Carta says the median post-money valuation reached $78.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, and its 2025 review says artificial intelligence startups at Series A carried a 38% valuation premium over non-artificial intelligence peers. (carta.com 1) (carta.com 2) The result is a venture market with record totals and fewer open doors. There is more money than ever in the system, but a larger share of it is chasing a smaller group of artificial intelligence companies that already have elite teams, early revenue, and the ability to justify very big rounds very fast. (crunchbase.com 1) (crunchbase.com 2)