Venture funding has rebounded strongly from the correction in 2022, but there is a stark difference between who gets funded and who doesn’t.
This was the overarching theme of our third quarter market reports, which showed that global startup funding in the third quarter was $97 billion, meaning that only the fourth quarter has surpassed $90 billion since the third quarter of 2022.
Still, there are stark differences between the market’s peak in 2021 and where it is now, as reporter Joanna Glasner has noted in several recent columns, here and here. As we saw 4 years ago, financing is fluid and often appears to be driven by investor FOMO. Some corporations even organize subsequent rounds at breakneck speed.
However, this time around, the funding growth is also much, much more concentrated – namely in large rounds for AI corporations.
Therefore, let’s take a look at charts illustrating the foremost topics of private market and startup financing in the last quarter of 2025.
Artificial intelligence funding continues to drive enterprise growth
According to Crunchbase data, almost half – 46% – of funding for startups around the world in the third quarter went to corporations dealing with artificial intelligence. Almost one third went to one company: Anthropicwhich raised $13 billion last quarter.
Even considering the astounding $45 billion committed to AI startups in the third quarter, this was only the third-highest quarter on record for AI funding, with higher numbers in Q4 2024 and Q1 2025.
Megarounds take the lion’s share
It should not be too much of a surprise that AI has also pushed investment heavily toward mega-rounds, which we define as financing deals of $100 million or more.
The percentage of total funding going to such deals has reached an all-time high this yr, with an astonishing 60% of global and 70% of US enterprise capital reaching greater than $100 million, in keeping with Crunchbase data.
Even with a few months left in the yr, it seems likely that the total dollars committed to such deals might be equal to or greater than the amount we saw in 2021, which was a peak in startup funding that has not scaled before or since.
Difference? At the time, startup dollars were widely distributed and went to many sectors – from food tech to health tech to robotics – as well as early-stage, late-stage and intermediate-stage corporations.
Contrast that with recent quarters, when LLM giants and other large, established AI-focused corporations are receiving the largest share of enterprise dollars.
Seed offers move on
As the number of megarounds increased, the number of seed transactions decreased.
As Crunchbase data shows, the number of seed deals has shown a regular downward trend in recent quarters, even as the total dollars invested at this stage remain relatively stable. This signifies that while seed deals are getting larger, they are also harder to get.
(*7*)
Early-stage funding has generally declined, despite larger rounds for corporations in robotics, biotechnology, artificial intelligence and other technologies.
AI has and doesn’t have it
Artificial intelligence has fascinated investors for three years.
What are they less interested in? Old solutions like cybersecurity and biotechnology. The share of biotechnology investment in total financing recently reached a 20-year low. Crunchbase data shows that cybersecurity investment, while still relatively stable, also declined barely in the third quarter of 2025. This is notable on condition that many cybersecurity corporations are integrating artificial intelligence into their offerings.
Still, other sectors that profit greatly from AI-powered automation are seeing a surge in investment. Perhaps most notable is legal tech, which surged to an all-time high last month because of large rounds for corporations promising to automate much of the hard skilled work.
Other sectors powered by AI include human resources software (including AI-powered recruitment and employment offers).
Other relevant data
Other interesting points that emerged from our third quarter reports and recent coverage include:
Looking to the future
The growing concentration of capital in a small group of large AI corporations – not to say the interrelationships of these transactions – raises obvious questions. Are we in a bubble? And on condition that almost half of enterprise capital in recent years has been related to artificial intelligence, what’s going to occur to the startup ecosystem if or when it emerges?