AI startups grab VC share
AI startups accounted for 41% of the $128B in venture capital tracked on Carta last year — a record concentration of funding into AI firms. At the same time enterprises are still struggling to build end‑to‑end “AI factory” infrastructure, keeping demand high for engineers who can deliver scalable ML pipelines and production orchestration. ( )
Carta’s State of Private Markets shows startups on its platform raised nearly $120 billion in 2025, a 16.9% increase from 2024, with Q4 alone bringing in $36.1 billion. (carta.com) Investors concentrated capital: Carta and TechCrunch report that roughly 10% of startups captured half of the funding last year, and at Series D, 58% of cash raised went to AI companies. ( ) Carta’s data also shows median valuations rose across stages — Series A AI valuations were 38% higher than non-AI peers and Series E+ AI valuations jumped 667% year-over-year — while newer funds that backed early AI winners posted the strongest IRRs. ( ) At NVIDIA’s GTC, the company framed the next phase as building “AI factories” and unveiled the Vera Rubin architecture plus platform software designed to boost inference efficiency and run agentic systems at scale. ( ) Industry coverage and post‑GTC announcements say most companies remain stuck converting pilots into integrated, repeatable AI factories, prompting cloud and vendor partnerships (AWS–NVIDIA and others) aimed specifically at production readiness and orchestration. ( ) Labor-market analyses back the talent squeeze: Indeed’s Hiring Lab found jobs mentioning AI rose (Indeed’s AI tracker hit 4.2% in December 2025 and AI terms appear in ~45% of data & analytics postings), while a review of 10,133 AI/ML engineering listings showed a median salary of $187,500 and 78% of roles targeting candidates with 5+ years’ experience. ( )
