Q1 AI funding surged to $240B

Artificial intelligence startups pulled in about $242 billion in venture funding in the first three months of 2026, according to Crunchbase’s first-quarter data. (news.crunchbase.com) Crunchbase said global startups raised $300 billion across roughly 6,000 companies in the quarter, and AI companies took 80% of that total. The firm called it an all-time high for quarterly venture investment. (news.crunchbase.com) The money was concentrated in a handful of giant rounds. OpenAI raised $122 billion, Anthropic raised $30 billion, xAI raised $20 billion, and Waymo raised $16 billion, for a combined $188 billion in one quarter. (news.crunchbase.com) Crunchbase also broke out “foundational” AI companies, the model builders behind tools like ChatGPT and Claude. That category raised $178 billion across 24 deals by March 31, up from $88.9 billion across 66 deals in all of 2025. (news.crunchbase.com) That shift pushed the broader market with it. Crunchbase said Q1 2026 startup funding alone equaled close to 70% of all venture capital spending in 2025, after three years of flat or declining startup investment. (news.crunchbase.com) The geographic split was just as lopsided. United States-based companies raised $250 billion in Q1, or 83% of global venture funding, while China ranked second at $16.1 billion and the United Kingdom third at $7.4 billion. (news.crunchbase.com) North America alone brought in $252.6 billion in startup funding in the quarter, and Crunchbase said more than 87% of that money went to companies in its AI-related categories. One OpenAI financing was larger than the previous quarterly record for all startup funding combined. (news.crunchbase.com) The biggest checks came with explicit infrastructure plans. xAI said its $20 billion Series E will fund “advanced AI” systems and larger graphics processing unit clusters, while Waymo said its $16 billion round will finance robotaxi expansion and autonomous driving technology. (x.ai) (waymo.com) Anthropic said its $30 billion Series G valued the company at $380 billion post-money, and OpenAI said in March 2025 that its own $40 billion round valued it at $300 billion post-money. Those company disclosures show how quickly frontier-model valuations have reset as investors fund computing capacity as much as software. (anthropic.com) (openai.com) Andreessen Horowitz, known as a16z, raised more than $15 billion in January and said that amount alone represented more than 18% of all venture capital dollars allocated in the United States in 2025. By April, Crunchbase’s quarter-end figures showed the market had already moved far beyond that baseline. (a16z.com) (news.crunchbase.com)