If 2024 was the year the AI bubble refused to burst, 2025 was the year it solidified into concrete.
We have spent the last twelve months tracking the capital torrent pouring into Silicon Valley (and, increasingly, Pittsburgh, New York, and Seattle), and the numbers are frankly numbing. But behind the eye-watering valuations and the endless “Series G” announcements lies a clear signal: the venture capital asset class has effectively reorganized itself around a single thesis: artificial intelligence is not just a sector; it is the economy.
To put that in perspective: that is nearly double the count from 2024. The bar for “mega-round” status has shifted. A $100 million check, once a headline-dominating event, is now merely table stakes for training a decent-sized model or buying enough H100s (or Blackwells) to stay relevant.
The $100 Million Club
This year’s list is defined not just by volume, but by velocity. Companies like Anysphere (creators of Cursor) and Poolside didn’t just raise once; they raised back-to-back rounds that saw their valuations triple in mere months. OpenAI and Anthropic continued their capital arms race, sucking up billions to build the next frontier models, while physical AI, robots that can fold laundry and brew coffee, finally had its “ChatGPT moment” with massive raises for Physical Intelligence and Skild AI.
Here is the breakdown of the 70 U.S. AI startups that defined the 2025 mega-funding wave.
Foundation Models & The “God Tier”
The capital intensity here is infinite. These companies are burning cash to build the brains of the future.
OpenAI, $40B – The industry leader secured the largest venture round in history, solidifying its position at the forefront of the generative revolution.
Anthropic, $13B – A challenger focused on safety and steerability, significantly backed by partners like Amazon and Google.
xAI, $10B – Building one of the world’s most powerful compute clusters to accelerate model capability.
Safe Superintelligence (SSI), $1B – Ilya Sutskever’s new research lab, dedicated purely to the pursuit of safe, advanced machine intelligence.
Thinking Machines, $2B – A significant new entrant building “reasoning engines” designed to tackle complex problem-solving beyond next-token prediction.
Magic, $117M+ – Developing AI with massive context windows, aiming to create systems that can understand and write entire software repositories.
Imbue, $200M – Focused on creating agents capable of reasoning and coding, moving beyond simple text generation.
Adept, $350M – Building models designed to navigate and use existing software tools alongside humans.
Together AI, $106M – A leader in the open ecosystem, facilitating the fine-tuning and deployment of open-weight models.
Essential AI, $100M – Developing enterprise-grade systems to automate complex corporate workflows.
Reka, $100M – A team of former researchers building capable multimodal models.
Contextual AI, $100M – improving enterprise reliability through advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Writer, $200M – A full-stack generative platform tailored for the specific needs of corporate marketing and communications.
Cohere, $500M – (US/Canada) focused strictly on enterprise applications, prioritizing data privacy and business utility.
Perplexity, $250M – Redefining information discovery with an answer engine that challenges traditional search paradigms.
Coding, Agents & Dev Tools
Investments here signal a belief that the role of the software engineer is evolving from writing code to orchestrating intelligent systems.
Anysphere (Cursor), $2.3B – The developers of Cursor, a platform rapidly changing how engineers write and debug code.
Poolside, $500M – Building advanced AI systems specifically designed to understand software development at a deep level.
Cognition, $400M – Creators of Devin, an autonomous software engineer designed to handle end-to-end development tasks.
Codeium, $150M – providing enterprise-secure coding assistance, gaining significant traction in large organizations.
Augment, $227M – A team of industry veterans building a new generation of developer assistance tools.
Distyl AI, $175M – delivering bespoke AI engineering for large enterprises, integrating advanced agents into legacy systems.
Uniphore, $260M – A quiet leader in enterprise AI, processing voice, video, and data to improve business communications.
Wonderful, $100M – A new player focused on creating personalized AI agents for individual users.
Parallel, $100M – Building the infrastructure required for autonomous agents to execute complex tasks on the web.
Tabnine, $100M – An early pioneer in code completion now expanding into broader agentic workflows.
CodeComplete – $100M – secure coding assistance deployed on-premises for privacy-conscious enterprises.
Modular, $250M – Working to unify the AI software stack to make models run more efficiently across different hardware.
Healthcare & Biotech
These companies are applying AI to the most critical sector of all: human health and longevity.
Hippocratic AI, $126M – Developing safety-focused models to alleviate healthcare staffing shortages and improve patient interaction.
Abridge, $150M+ – Reducing physician burnout by automating clinical documentation with high accuracy.
OpenEvidence, $200M – providing clinicians with reliable, cited medical information to support decision-making.
Sesame, $250M – An AI-enhanced marketplace aiming to make direct care more accessible and affordable.
EliseAI, $250M – streamlining operations in healthcare and housing to improve administrative efficiency.
SmarterDx, $100M – using clinical AI to ensure accurate medical charting and billing.
Ambience Healthcare, $100M – A key player in the ambient computing space, helping doctors focus on patients rather than screens.
Genesis Therapeutics, $200M – Integrating AI into drug discovery to bring new therapies to the clinic faster.
Insitro, $200M – Daphne Koller’s company continues to lead in applying machine learning to biological data.
Recursion, $200M – (Public/Late Stage), deeply investing in mapping biology to industrialize drug discovery.
PathAI, $100M – advancing pathology diagnostics through machine learning.
Infrastructure & Compute
This sector represents the physical reality of AI: the chips, data centers, and energy required to power the digital age.
Cerebras Systems, $1.1B – Pioneering a wafer-scale architecture to dramatically accelerate AI compute.
Lambda, $480M – providing accessible GPU cloud resources for researchers and companies.
CoreWeave, $1B+ – A specialized cloud provider building the massive infrastructure needed for modern model training.
Groq, $640M – delivering near-instant inference speeds with their Language Processing Unit (LPU) technology.
Etched, $120M – developing specialized silicon hardware specifically to run Transformer models efficiently.
Scale AI, $1B – The essential data foundry, ensuring that the information feeding these models is accurate and useful.
Vast Data, $118M – reimagining storage architectures to handle the massive data throughput of the AI era.
Weka, $100M+ – high-performance data platforms designed for the demands of GPU clusters.
Pinecone, $100M – A vector database providing the long-term memory essential for LLMs.
Weaviate, $100M – An open-source vector search engine powering AI applications.
Lightmatter, $155M – Using photonic (light-based) computing to solve the energy and speed bottlenecks of AI workloads.
Celestial AI, $175M – developing optical interconnects to address data transfer challenges.
Majestic Labs, $90M (Rounded to wave) – innovating in infrastructure optimization.
Robotics & Physical AI
Bringing intelligence out of the screen and into the physical environment.
Figure, $675M – Developing general-purpose humanoid robots to support human labor.
Physical Intelligence, $600M – Building a “universal brain” capable of controlling various robot bodies.
Skild AI, $300M – Creating a foundation model for robotic manipulation and physical interaction.
Shield AI, $200M – developing autonomous piloting systems for defense applications.
Anduril, $1.5B – A defense technology company heavily integrating autonomous systems.
Covariant, $100M – giving warehouse robots the ability to adapt to changing environments.
Agility Robotics, $150M – Makers of “Digit,” a humanoid robot designed for logistics and warehouse work.
1X, $100M – (US/Norway) creating androids intended to assist in homes and offices.
Enterprise & Vertical AI
The integration of AI into the fabric of business and governance.
Glean, $260M – An enterprise search platform that connects employees with their company’s internal knowledge.
Harvey, $600M (cumulative) – transforming legal services with specialized AI for law firms.
Sierra, $110M – focused on creating empathetic and effective customer service agents.
RapidSOS, $100M – connecting data from connected devices to emergency first responders to save lives.
Tenzai, $100M (cumulative) – enhancing marketing and creative workflows.
Deel, $100M+ (AI expansion) – modernizing HR and payroll for a global workforce with AI.
EvenUp, $100M – empowering personal injury lawyers with data-driven insights.
Generative Media & Creativity
Hollywood is scared, and these companies are the reason.
Fal, $125M – The lightning-fast inference engine for media generation.
Suno, $125M – The “ChatGPT for Music” that broke into the mainstream.
Luma AI, $100M+ – Dream Machine video generation.
Black Forest Labs, $100M+ – The creators of Flux, the open-weight image model that took the crown from Midjourney.
A Moment of Reflection
The sheer volume of capital deployment this year suggests a definitive bifurcation in the market. We are seeing a divide between those with the resources to build foundational technologies and those who will build upon them.
As we look toward 2026, the challenge shifts from raising capital to meaningful deployment. The ease of securing funding contrasts with the complexity of integrating these powerful tools into the delicate fabric of our economy and society. The true measure of this era will not be the money raised, but the tangible value created for people.
