AI budgets and VC surge
Companies are shifting spending heavily into AI-native tools — enterprise IT investment in AI rose about 94.3% year‑over‑year while legacy SaaS is declining. (x.com) Venture funding backs the shift: global AI venture funding reached roughly $300 billion in Q1 2026, and OpenAI’s enterprise share climbed from about 30% to 40% — firms repeatedly name Nvidia, Microsoft and Google among the winners positioned for growth. (x.com) (x.com)
Corporate technology budgets are moving into artificial intelligence tools faster than the rest of software spending can keep up. Menlo Ventures estimated companies spent $37 billion on generative artificial intelligence in 2025, up from $11.5 billion in 2024. (menlovc.com) More than half of that 2025 spending, about $19 billion, went to applications rather than model building or infrastructure. Menlo said that was more than 6% of the entire software market after just three years of the generative artificial intelligence cycle. (menlovc.com) That change is colliding with a broader rethink of old software pricing. PitchBook wrote in February 2026 that public software valuations were being repriced as companies shifted from charging per seat to charging for automated work done by artificial intelligence systems. (pitchbook.com) Venture investors have followed the same direction, but the money is piling into a small number of companies. Crunchbase said global startups raised $300 billion in the first quarter of 2026, and $242 billion of that, or 80%, went to artificial intelligence companies. (news.crunchbase.com) KPMG put the quarter even higher at $330.9 billion across 8,464 deals as of March 31, 2026, and said the jump was driven by record artificial intelligence megadeals. KPMG also said the Americas captured roughly 80% of global venture investment in the quarter. (kpmg.com) The biggest rounds explain much of the total. Crunchbase said OpenAI raised $122 billion, Anthropic $30 billion, xAI $20 billion and Waymo $16 billion in the quarter, with those four rounds alone accounting for $188 billion, or 65% of global venture investment. (news.crunchbase.com) Inside companies, the model race is shifting too. Menlo Ventures said Anthropic reached 40% of enterprise large language model spending in 2025, while OpenAI fell to 26%, down from 34% in 2024 and 50% in 2023. (menlovc.com) OpenAI is still getting more of its business from companies than it did a year ago. OpenAI Chief Revenue Officer Denise Dresser said on April 8, 2026 that enterprise now makes up 40% of the company’s revenue and is on pace to match consumer revenue by the end of 2026. (openai.com) (cnbc.com) Public-market investors are rewarding some parts of the buildout more than others. Goldman Sachs said in December 2025 that consensus estimates for 2026 capital spending by artificial intelligence hyperscalers had risen to $527 billion, while investors were becoming more selective about which companies could turn that spending into revenue. (goldmansachs.com) Other data firms are seeing the same split between bigger funding totals and a narrower market underneath. CB Insights said quarterly venture funding hit a record $285.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026, even as fewer firms were writing checks and fewer deals were getting done. (cbinsights.com) The result is a market where companies are buying artificial intelligence software faster, investors are financing a handful of suppliers at historic scale, and the contest is shifting from who has a model to who can turn that model into paid work. (menlovc.com) (pitchbook.com)
