Instead, in recent years funding is increasingly about pouring ever-larger sums into a few companies already considered a big deal in their respective industries. That practice culminated this year in a record $40 billion financing for OpenAI that constituted close to half of all first-quarter 2025 U.S. startup funding. The predominance of mega-rounds isn't limited to OpenAI. To illustrate, we used Crunchbase data to determine the percentage of annual startup funding in the U.S. that has gone to the 10 largest reported rounds. 1 !function(e,n,i,s){var d="InfogramEmbeds";var o=e.getElementsByTagName(n)[0];if(window[d]&&window[d].initialized)window[d].process&&window[d].process();else if(!e.getElementById(i)){var r=e.createElement(n);r.async=1,r.id=i,r.src=s,o.parentNode.insertBefore(r,o)}}(document,"script","infogram-async","https://e.infogram.com/js/dist/embed-loader-min.js"); Building a generative AI unicorn is an expensive undertaking, and it should surprise no one that companies...
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