The excitement around artificial intelligence led to a record year for certain types of fundraising.
Silicon Valley’s AI companies secured record funding in 2025, even as investors advised startups to shore up as much capital as possible before a potential AI bust.
The largest private U.S. companies raised a record $150 billion in 2025, overshadowing the previous high of $92 billion raised in 2021, according to a report by the Financial Times, citing private market data provider PitchBook.
Private investors allocated the majority of the capital to the biggest AI companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The companies need an unprecedented amount of money to launch as they scramble to build the expensive infrastructure and hire the thought leaders that AI requires.
Companies are creating cash cushions — also known as fortress balance sheets — to protect themselves from a possible downturn.
Much of the funding was flowing to the largest companies in the largest deals. The top four deals accounted for more than 30% of the total deal value.
In 2025, OpenAI raised $40 billion, the largest private round in history, Anthropic raised $13 billion, Elon Musk’s xAI raised $10 billion and Meta acquired data labeling startup Scale AI for nearly $15 billion.
The concentration of capital could be bad for the industry, Kyle Stanford, a PitchBook analyst covering the venture capital industry, wrote in a report.
“Market value concentration indicates an increase in long-term systemic risk to venture capital, as that value has proven difficult to realize, even while private market values keep growing and revenue multiples reach unsustainable levels,” he said in the report.
Companies including SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic could list their shares as early as 2026.
Several other AI companies surpassed the $2-billion funding mark over the year, including Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus and Databricks.
The AI hype has taken over the public market as well. Nine of the top 10 most valuable companies in the world are tech companies riding the AI wave. Companies including Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet are worth more than $3 trillion each now.
The productivity gains from AI automating tasks have started affecting early career jobs, and sparked political pushback against automation. Yet, the 2026 promise rests on the wider adoption of “AI agents” — systems that can understand user intent and autonomously do tasks such as shopping, planning holidays and executing complex decisions — becoming a larger part of the economy.
To will that future into reality, Big Tech companies are projected to invest more than $500 billion in 2026 to build AI infrastructure, including networks and data centers.
“The risks then become not in the potential loss of capital should these companies fail, but in the market-wide losses if underlying technologies can’t live up to the hype and generate meaningful impact on the economy,” Stanford of PitchBook wrote.