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Asian Startup Funding Fell In 2025 But Rose In Q4
Funding to Asia-based startups ticked lower in 2025. Even so, the fourth quarter closed out the annum on an up note, with the highest quarterly investment tally of the year, Crunchbase data shows. In total, investors poured $67.5 billion into reported seed- through growth-stage rounds for companies across Asia in last year, per Crunchbase data. That’s a decline of about 6% from 2024, and the lowest annual total in five years. The lackluster numbers resulted mostly from weak investment in the first half of the year. Momentum picked up in the latter half, boosted in particular by rising investment in Chinese startups. Funding gains culminated in Q4, with $21.7 billion in reported investments. That’s a rise of 19% quarter over quarter, and 22% year over year. The increase was most pronounced for late-stage dealmaking. For broader perspective, below we look at dealmaking across stages and country-by-country, as well as focus on AI-focused investment. Table of contents Late stage Later-stage startups received the largest share of funding, so that’s where we’ll start. An estimated $10.4 billion went to Asia-based companies at Series C and beyond in Q4, per Crunchbase data, the highest quarterly total of the year. For the full year, meanwhile, later-stage and technology growth investment totaled $30.8 billion. For Q4, a few jumbo rounds for China-based startups played a big role in boosting the totals. These included a reported $874 million Series C for EV brand Deepal, a $600 million Series D for autonomous delivery vehicle provider Neolix, and a $500 million Series C for agentic AI company Moonshot AI. Early stage Early-stage investors also ended the year on a positive note, with $8.9 billion in reported Q4 deals, the highest quarterly total of the year. For the full year, funding at Series A and Series B stages totaled $28.2 billion, down about 10% year over year. A few large individual rounds lifted the tallies. This included NeueHCT, a startup focused on intelligent driving technology, and AA-I Technologies, an Israeli startup focused on artificial general intelligence, which each picked up $200 million financings. Seed stage Seed-stage investment moved higher in Q4, with $2.1 billion in reported deals, the highest total in the past four quarters. We expect the tally to rise a bit more over time, as well, as more deals are added later to the dataset. For the full year, meanwhile, reported seed funding to startups in Asia was estimated at $8.2 billion. That’s down about 6% from 2024. AI investment Artificial intelligence investment also scaled to record heights in 2025, peaking in the fourth quarter. For the full year, investment to startups in Crunchbase AI-related categories totaled $16.7 billion. Of that, just over 38% was in Q4. Country-by-country funding tallies While China’s startup funding remains far below historical highs, the country remains the leading destination for Asia’s venture investment. Next is India, followed by Israel, Japan and Singapore. For Q4, we saw China widen its lead some, bolstered by large deals around electric vehicles, autonomous driving and AI infrastructure. The big picture: Restrained, but looking up Overall, funding tallies paint an image of an investment environment that’s constrained, but with some bullish undertones. One particularly positive indicator is that investment picked up in Q4, indicating momentum is upward, not downward. Still, funding remains well below peak levels. So there’s a lot of catching up to do. Correction: A previous version of the Asia Venture Dollar Volume By Annum chart contained incorrect data. It has been updated. Methodology The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data is as of Jan. 4, 2026. Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year. Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price. Glossary of funding terms Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less. Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million. Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round. Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.) Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Defense Tech Unicorn Onebrief Raises $200M, Acquires Seed Startup As VC Funding For Military-Related Tech Surges
Defense tech startup Onebrief has raised another $200 million and acquired a small battle simulation company, Axios reported. The deals follow on the heels of a record-setting year for venture investment into defense tech startups, per Crunchbase data. Battery Ventures and Sapphire Ventures led the Series D funding for Honolulu-based Onebrief. Investors including Salesforce Ventures 1, General Catalyst and Insight Partners joined. An updated valuation was not reported, but the company raised its Series C just seven months ago at a $1.1 billion pre-money valuation, per Crunchbase. Onebrief has now raised $311 million in total, per Crunchbase data. Along with the funding, the company acquired Battle Road Digital, a startup that makes simulation and wargaming software for the military and raised a $5 million seed round in 2023. The company’s AI-driven collaborative and planning software is used by the U.S. Department of Defense to design, coordinate and brief complex military operations more efficiently, functions previously done on paper, through email and hand-written notes. “Staffs are too slow. They’re just too slow for how fast our adversaries move now; they’re too slow for how complex the modern battlefield is. We need things to move hundreds of times faster than they do, and that takes automation,” Onebrief CEO Grant Demaree, a former Army officer, told Axios. With conflicts brewing around the world, venture investment in defense tech startups has soared in recent years, Crunchbase data shows. Funding to VC-backed startups in defense — defined by us as the industries of military, national security and law enforcement — hit $7.7 billion across close to 100 deals in 2025, per Crunchbase data. That was a record high for investment in the space and more than double 2024’s tally. Related Crunchbase queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Exclusive: Flip Raises $20M Series A For Its Verticalized Approach To AI-Based Customer Service
Flip, a startup that claims to offer an Amazon Alexa-like voice AI experience for businesses, has raised $20 million in a Series A funding round, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively. CEO Brian Schiff and CRO Sam Krut met a decade ago in college and began building different ventures together. After a few pivots, they raised funding for New York-based Flip in 2018 with the goal of building AI that “answers and automatically resolves routine requests” for customers calling into a variety of businesses. They started with a focus on transportation companies and moved into retail in 2021 and healthcare in 2024. AI-based customer service is a saturated space, but Schiff claims Flip’s approach is differentiated because it’s a vertical one that is very focused on just three industries. Brian Schiff and Sam Krut, co-founders of Flip. [Courtesy photo] Among vertical players, Schiff claims that Flip has an advantage because its AI “is battle-tested on more than 300 million phone calls.” Next Coast Ventures and Ridge Ventures co-led the round for Flip, which says it has raised a total of $31 million in funding. Data Point Capital also participated in the round, alongside ScOp Venture Capital, Bullpen Capital, Forum Ventures and a group of angel investors. Flip declined to reveal valuation, saying only that it was up 3x compared to its seed raise. Year-over-year growth Today, Flip has hundreds of enterprise customers, including Under Armour, Tory Burch, Newell Brands and global transportation companies. The company has reached an eight-figure ARR, growing 3x year over year, according to Schiff. Interestingly, the idea for Flip came when Schiff and Krut were students at Cornell University. They had built a ride-hailing app called Red Route for calling taxis at Cornell, at a time when Uber was still banned in upstate New York. It was during that experience they came up with the idea for what is today Flip. “Customer service is one of the obvious AI categories for business, and we’re talking on a daily and weekly basis with the largest brands on the planet,” Schiff said. “Even for them, it’s not a question of ‘if.’ It’s a question of ‘when’ and ‘with whom.’” That, he said, has created “a huge amount of noise” in the market. Over the past year or so, a number of what Schiff described as “generic AI providers” popped up. “The great irony of this space right now is that while all of the headlines and much of the funding has gone into these generic platforms that are trying to be the AI everything for everyone, across every industry, every channel, every use case. In reality, most of the actual traction, most of the successful customer stories, are working with vendors like Flip that are going very deep into one or a couple of specific industries,” Schiff told Crunchbase News in an interview. Another differentiator, in his view, is that few companies have developed deep expertise with AI telephone customer service. “Most people are doing it inside of chatbots or auto email responders,” he said. “We really look at the quality of the experience. It doesn’t matter how nice it is to talk to — it’s still just another bot that’s in the way of a customer trying to solve their problem.” When it comes to the revenue model, Flip doesn’t charge an upfront cost or require a long-term commitment. Rather, it charges per automated call — a usage model it has implemented since its early days. ‘A vertical approach yields the best results’ Alex Rosen, managing partner at Ridge Ventures, believes that customer service is one of the few huge markets where generative AI has produced tangible results for enterprise customers and a better experience for users. “Based on our 30+ years of investing in software, we believe a vertical approach yields the best results,” he wrote via email. “Flip has taken a different approach than many others by focusing on a couple of verticals and going really deep … While there are plenty of competitors making noise, some are going after different parts of the market, and Flip has quietly, up to now, launched more live customer deployments, at scale, than anyone.” Mike Smerklo, co-founder and managing director at Next Coast Ventures, said he has spent nearly two decades in and around call centers and voice technologies and has “never seen a more compelling ROI for customers” than what Flip offers. He added: “The founding team is exceptional, customer feedback has been tremendous, and the potential for Flip to become a $1 billion business is clear.” Smerklo said he is also impressed with the company’s capital-efficient approach to growth. “Several other companies that have raised tremendously more money have to rely on ‘forward engineering’ to get their product to work for customers,” he said. “Flip’s solution works, doesn’t require a massive investment from customers, and solves real, salient business issues.” Related Crunchbase query: Illustration: Dom Guzman
LatAm Startup Funding Rebounds In 2025 As Mexico Sees Surge In Investment And VCs Remain Bullish On Region
Latin American startup investment climbed by 14.3% in 2025, driven by a boost in both early- and late-stage funding, Crunchbase data shows. Overall, venture funding in the region increased to $4.1 billion across seed- through growth-stage deals in 2025, up from $3.6 billion in 2024. Investors active in the area who spoke with Crunchbase News also said they remain bullish on Latin America’s potential for startup innovation, particularly in financial services and as the region’s middle class continues to expand. However, venture dollars invested in 2025 across such deals still totaled less than half of the $8.4 billion invested in 2022, and were a fraction of the amount invested in 2021, a record-setting year for the region’s startup investment levels. In the fourth quarter, venture funding in Latin America amounted to $1.085 billion, down 16% from $1.285 billion raised by LatAm startups in Q4 2024, and up 1% from the $1.07 billion raised in Q3 2025. Table of contents Brazil still leads Following historical trends, Brazil remained the region’s top venture investment destination in 2025, followed by Mexico. In total, Brazil-based startups raised $2.1 billion during the year, up 10.5% from the $1.9 billion raised in 2024. Mexico-based startups brought in $1.1 billion in funding in 2025, up 53% from the $718 million raised in 2024. For perspective, we charted out total investment, color-coded by stage, for the past 12 quarters below. Late stage and technology growth Of the total amount raised in 2025, $1.63 billion went into late-stage and growth deals, up 14% year over year. In the fourth quarter, just $251 million flowed into late-stage and growth deals, down 69% compared to $806 million in Q4 2024. That’s also down 39.2% compared to the third quarter of 2025, when startups in the region raised $413 million in late-stage and growth funding. Notably, Mexico-based startups had the distinction of raising the three largest rounds of 2025. Plata, a Mexico City-based startup offering Mastercard credit cards, picked up $160 million in a March Series A led by Kora at a reported $1.5 billion valuation. Then, just over seven months later, the fintech raised a $250 million Series B, more than doubling its valuation to $3.1 billion. And, in late June, Mexico City-based fintech startup Klar — believed to be Mexico’s largest digital bank —- announced a $170 million Series C round that valued the company at $800 million. Early stage Meanwhile, early-stage investment surged in the fourth quarter of 2025 with $690 million flowing into startups, up an impressive 112% compared to the $325 million in Q4 2024. For 2025 as a whole, early-stage investment totaled nearly $2 billion, up 31.9% compared to the $1.48 billion in all of 2024. Seed and angel Seed and angel investment totaled $144 million for the fourth quarter, which marked a 6.5% decrease year over. For all of 2025, seed and angel investment amounted to $540 million, down 22% compared to the $692 million raised in 2024. Investor POV: An inflection point Michael Nicklas, a partner at Valor Capital Group who is based in Rio de Janeiro, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm is optimistic about Latin America because the region “combines scale, a young and increasingly digital population, and deep structural inefficiencies that technology can solve — especially across financial services, commerce, logistics, health, and education.” In his view, Latin America is now reaching a structural inflection point. Greater digital access, middle-class expansion, infrastructure investment and pro-innovation regulation — such as open finance in Brazil — are converging to unlock new business models across the digital economy, he said. At the same time, significant inefficiencies remain, which creates more opportunity. In Brazil, for example, corporate credit represents around 32% of GDP, compared with roughly 73% in the United States, a gap that illustrates how much value is still to be created, according to Nicklas. “The region has already proven its ability to build category leaders, and growing connectivity between the U.S. and Latin America reinforces Valor’s cross-border strategy, supporting both Latin companies expanding globally and global companies entering the region,” he added. “Latin America is also emerging as a pragmatic laboratory for blockchain adoption, driven by real economic needs,” he said. Fintech and broader financial infrastructure are core focus areas for Valor Capital, including payments, digital banking, crypto and digital assets, and platforms that expand financial inclusion and efficiency, particularly in credit. Brazil, in particular, is central to this thesis, he believes. “The country has become a global benchmark for regulatory leadership, with what is often called the “Brazil Stack” — digital identity through Gov.br, instant payments via Pix, and data-sharing frameworks such as Open Finance, alongside the development of Drex,” he noted. “These modern rails materially reduce friction and create the foundation for a new generation of financial and digital products.” Beyond financial services, Valor is increasingly focused on enterprise and B2B software that digitize large, inefficient industries such as logistics, retail and services. The firm also invests in technology-enabled consumer, commerce and infrastructure plays, from mobility and logistics to edtech and healthtech. Damaris Mendoza, a Mexico City-based partner at 500 Global, told Crunchbase News that her firm is “incredibly bullish” on Latin America. “The opportunity is still immense,” she wrote via email. “We’re still a region with deeply significant challenges, which translates into incredible opportunities for ambitious entrepreneurs.” The region is also still profoundly underinvested, in her view, “with major capitalization needs,” especially in early stages. “As a region, we have all the ingredients: strong technical talent, ambition, resilience, and massive opportunities,” she said. “And when you add capital that genuinely provides differentiated value, it becomes an incredibly exciting recipe.” As with Valor, fintech remains the asset class favorite for 500 Global. However, Mendoza believes there is room for disruption and capitalization “across every industry” in the region. Hustle Fund partner Haley Bryant noted that her firm has been investing in Latin America since 2020 and has backed more than 20 companies across the region. Fintech makes up about half of Hustle Fund’s LatAm investments. “Neobanks and payments laid the groundwork,” she said. “Now we’re seeing a second wave of more vertical and infrastructure-driven fintech, SME financial services, underwriting, insurtech, and digital wealth.” Beyond fintech, Hustle Fund is also excited about AI-native enterprise and vertical software in under-digitized sectors like healthcare, logistics, manufacturing and back-office ops. “These are markets where strong fundamentals and capital efficiency really matter, and LatAm founders are building with that mindset from day one,” Bryant told Crunchbase News. While acknowledging that Brazil “still matters a lot” given its GDP and scale of outcomes, as in the case of Nubank, Bryant said Hustle Fund is currently especially excited about Mexico. The country has become a “real regional hub” as founders and operators relocate there, “driven by nearshoring, proximity to the U.S., and a growing density of talent and capital,” she added. “Networks and capital are helping LatAm not only mature but compound, as experienced operators from Nubank, Rappi, Newports, Kavak, and others are starting their next act, and global talent is being drawn to Mexico City in particular,” she said. “I’m especially excited about ecosystems with strong fintech talent like Colombia and technical talent like Argentina that could start regionally and expand, and founders coming out of overlooked geographies.” Methodology The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data is as of Jan. 4, 2026. Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year. Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price. Glossary of funding terms Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less. Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million. Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round. Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.) Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: xAI Leads As 2026 Is Off To A Brisk Start
Want to keep track of the largest startup funding deals in 2025 with our curated list of $100 million-plus venture deals to U.S.-based companies? Check out The Crunchbase Megadeals Board. This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out last year’s biggest funding deal roundup here. After a big year for venture investment, fueled by the AI boom, 2026 is not showing signs of a slowdown. Quite the contrary, with the first full week of the year bringing us a whopping $20 billion new funding round for Elon Musk’s xAI. We also counted multiple rounds of over $100 million that look minuscule by comparison but are actually very large by traditional venture standards. 1. xAI, $20B, generative AI: Musk’s xAI, the generative AI startup known for its Grok chatbot and the parent company of X (formerly Twitter), said it secured $20 billion in Series E funding from a long list of venture and strategic investors. Founded in 2023, xAI has raised $42.7 billion in reported debt and equity funding to date, per Crunchbase data. 2. Parabilis Medicines, $305M, precision medicines: Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Parabilis Medicines announced it raised $305 million in a Series F financing co-led by RA Capital Management, Fidelity and Janus Henderson Investors. The financing will support continued clinical development of its peptide platform for cancer therapeutics. 3. Soley Therapeutics, $200M, biotech: Soley Therapeutics, developer of a cell stress sensing platform and a pipeline of therapeutics for neurodegenerative disorders and metabolic diseases, closed on $200 million in Series C funding. Surveyor Capital led the financing for the South San Francisco, California-based company. 4. LMArena, $150M, AI: San Francisco-based LMArena, a platform for evaluating AI models and systems, picked up $150 million in fresh funding. Felicis Ventures 1 and UC Investments led the financing, which set a $1.7 billion post-money valuation, nearly triple the value at its seed round in mid-2025. 5. Diagonal Therapeutics, $125M, biotech: Diagonal Therapeutics, a biotech developing disease-modifying clustering antibodies that correct dysregulated signaling in severe genetic diseases, raised $125 million in Series B funding. Sanofi Ventures and Janus Henderson Investors led the financing for the Watertown, Massachusetts-based company. 6 (tied). Lyte, $107M, physical world AI: Mountain View, California-based Lyte, a startup focused on integrated perception for robotics and AI, emerged from stealth this week and disclosed it has raised $107 million in aggregate funding. The company says its mission is to “give robots the ability to see, understand, and operate safely in the physical world.” 6 (tied). EpiBiologics, $107M, biotech: EpiBiologics, a company working on tissue-selective extracellular protein degradation, says it completed a $107 million Series B financing. Google Ventures and Johnson & Johnson Innovation co-led the round for the San Mateo, California-based company. 8 (tied). Cambium, $100M, advanced materials: El Segundo, California-based Cambium, a startup developing advanced materials for defense, aerospace, and other sectors, secured $100 million in a Series B round led by 8VC 2. 8 (tied). Rakuten Medical, $100M, cancer therapeutics: Rakuten Medical, a San Diego-based startup focused on photoimmunotherapy for cancer treatment, raised $100 million in Series F financing led by TaiAx. The company is currently enrolling patients into its global Phase 3 trial for recurrent head and neck cancer. 10. Pomelo Care, $92M, virtual care: Pomelo Care, a virtual healthcare provider for women and children, raised $92 million in a Series C funding led by Stripes. The financing set a $1.7 billion valuation for the New York-based company. Methodology We tracked the largest announced rounds in the Crunchbase database that were raised by U.S.-based companies for the period of Jan. 3-9. Although most announced rounds are represented in the database, there could be a small time lag as some rounds are reported late in the week. Illustration: Dom Guzman
A16z Raises $15B In New Funds, Its Largest Haul To Date, Promises To Back Startups Advancing U.S. Interests
Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz on Friday announced $15 billion in new funds, its largest fundraising haul to date, with the firm promising to back startups in AI, crypto and beyond that it says advance American interests. The new funds include $6.75 billion for its growth fund. It also raised $1.176 billion for its American Dynamism practice, which backs defense and security related startups, $1.7 billion for its Apps fund, $1.7 billion for its Infrastructure fund, $700 million for its Bio & Health fund, and $3 billion for what it calls “other venture strategies.” The fundraising kick comes on the back of the strongest year for North American startup investment in four years. Startups based in the region raised $280 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase data, up 46% year over year. The majority of venture dollars invested in North America last year went to the AI sector. Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, was a major driver of that investment surge. Although the firm invests mostly in the U.S., it was the second most active post-seed venture investor globally last year, per Crunchbase data, behind only startup accelerator Y Combinator. All told, a16z participated in at least 165 post-seed startup funding deals in 2025, including investments in Cursor maker Anysphere, legal tech unicorn Harvey, predictions market Kalshi, AI lab Safe Superintelligence, publishing platform Substack, surveillance startup Flock Safety, AI voice startup ElevenLabs, and Databricks. The Menlo Park, California-based firm claims to have raised 18% of all venture capital dollars invested in the U.S. in 2025. Its new fundraising kick comes on the heels of the slowest year for new fundraising by venture capital firms since 2017, per preliminary data from the National Venture Capital Association and Pitchbook. In a blog post, firm co-founder and general partner Ben Horowitz highlighted the firm’s focus on investing domestically, as well as themes around American national security and the imperative for the U.S. to maintain a technological lead over rivals like China. “Our mission is ensuring that America wins the next 100 years of technology,” he wrote. “That starts with winning the key architectures of the future – AI and crypto. It continues with applying those technologies to the key areas that generate human flourishing: biology, health, defense, public safety, education, and entertainment. And it culminates with the American government adopting these technologies to defend and advance American interests.” The firm’s notable exits over the years include Airbnb, Coinbase, Lyft, Pinterest, Slack and Okta. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
What We Learned This Year From 6 Active AI Investors Backing Startups Across The Stack
Editor’s note: In 2025, Crunchbase News heard from six active startup investors in artificial intelligence. Below, we publish highlights from those interviews or presentations. Read the full stories with Accel, Dell Technologies, Foundation Capital, GV, AI Fund and Sierra Ventures, as well as highlights from interviews in 2023 and 2024. AI investment accelerated in 2025, as startups and investors alike angled for market share in this tech wave. By Q3, nearly half of all startup funding globally went to AI companies, according to Crunchbase data. Global venture funding overall was up 38% year over year in the third quarter, powered largely by megadeals for AI giants. All told, AI startups raised around $100 billion in the first half of 2025 alone, roughly matching 2024’s full-year total. Against that backdrop, six active AI investors shared their insights with us this year and offered a ground-level view of how the playbook is evolving, from compute and data moats to new models for co-founding companies. Here’s what we learned. Accel’s Boterri: How startups can compete against behemothsPhilippe Botteri, partner at Accel The “Super Six” companies — Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta — generate hundreds of billions in operating cash flow, much of which is being poured straight back into AI infrastructure. Accel partner Philippe Botteri and his firm’s 2025 Globalscape report highlighted the new AI power map and how startups can compete. The firm is one of the three most-active investors on the The Crunchbase Unicorn Board, which has surged in value this year amid the AI boom. Accel in particular has backed a wave of native AI startups at both the model and application layer. Those startups include Anthropic, small model developer H Co., publicly traded AI infrastructure provider Nebius Group, and application-layer companies including Cursor-maker Anysphere, Perplexity, Synthesia and security startup Cyera. While the incumbents are capturing enormous share, there’s still room for focused, fast-growing AI-native companies to wedge themselves into new categories or reinvent old ones, according to Boterri. “If you don’t think that GenAI is going to generate a 1%-2% increase in the global GDP, then I’m not sure why we’re doing all this,” he said last month, speaking onstage at Web Summit in Lisbon, where Crunchbase News was also in attendance. Where Foundation see opportunities in physical techSteve Vassallo, general partner at Foundation Capital But AI’s massive acceleration and computing needs also raise an existential question for the industry: Will the physical infrastructure keep up? As many of the investors we spoke with this year noted, AI’s bottlenecks are increasingly physical — power, chips and data centers — and those bottlenecks are spawning some of the most interesting startup opportunities. Botteri’s analysis points to an estimated 117-gigawatt energy shortfall over the next five years needed to serve projected AI demand — roughly equivalent to powering three large European economies combined. It’s a problem that Steve Vassallo, general partner at Foundation Capital, is also coming at from the venture side. The firm incubated AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems back in 2016, well before today’s enthusiasm around AI infrastructure, and has gone on to back more than 100 AI startups. In our interview, Vassallo recalled that betting on semiconductors in the mid-2010s “was a recipe for losing a lot of money” — but the team believed AI workloads were growing so fast that traditional architectures would eventually hit a wall. That thesis now looks prescient as Cerebras has signaled plans to go public, and chip giant Nvidia’s market cap has exploded to above $4 trillion. Vassallo argued that the companies that matter most in this cycle will be those that both harness AI and are mindful of how humans can be “hacked” — in other words, products that respect psychology as much as physics. He pointed in particular to reinforcement learning with human feedback, where people help close the loop on AI behavior and, in the process, become more adept at working alongside the systems they’re training. The firm’s AI investments include seed rounds into Tennr, a company automating authorization healthcare workflows from often convoluted and paper-based processes, and Jasper, an app that assists with writing built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3. It also invested in the Series A for PlayerZero, whose product predicts and debugs software failures in AI-written code before it is deployed. “We love working with founders who are living right at that edge,” Vassallo said. Why Dell’s venture arm invests at the silicon levelDaniel Docter, managing director at Dell Technologies Capital At Dell Technologies Capital, or DTC, managing director Daniel Docter and partner Elana Lian sit at the intersection of infrastructure and enterprise demand. Dell expects $20 billion in AI server shipments by fiscal 2026, and its venture arm has logged six exits since June — one IPO and five acquisitions — even as exits elsewhere in venture have been harder to come by. As we discussed in our interview, Dell’s position as a leading GPU server provider means its venture arms sees nearly every serious enterprise AI buyer and builder up close. Elana Lian, partner at Dell Technologies Capital And like other investors we spoke with, DTC noted that the current pace of investment in hot AI startups feels unprecedented. “We’ll meet with a company on a Tuesday for the first time and sometimes by Thursday, they have a term sheet that they’ve already signed,” Docter said. The firm’s infrastructure-level investments include AI chipmaker Rivos, which Meta plans to acquire for an undisclosed amount. (The deal is pending regulatory approval.) It has also backed SiMa.ai, which makes a chip for embedded edge use cases including in automobile, drone and robot technologies, and Runpod, an AI developer software layer with on-demand access to GPUs. DTC invests at the silicon level because you “can be incredibly disruptive to the ecosystem,” Docter told us. At the application level, DTC’s investments include Maven AGI, which provides customer support for complex and high-compliance enterprise use cases, and Series Entertainment, a GenAI platform for game development that aims to drastically shorten deployment timelines. Sierra Ventures’ layer-cake approachTim Guleri, managing partner, Sierra Ventures If compute is the bottleneck, data is the differentiator. Lian at DTC put it bluntly: “AI is almost a data problem.” For models to keep improving, she argued, you need high-quality, domain-specific data — not just more parameters. At Sierra Ventures, managing partner Tim Guleri is also focused on data. As he explained in our interview, his firm tends to seek out startups that share a pattern: They attack big, painful workflows, promise order-of-magnitude productivity improvements, and sit on top of rich datasets. Sierra’s “layered cake” framework breaks AI investing into five levels: infrastructure; applied infrastructure on top of foundational models; horizontal applications; vertical applications; and entirely novel innovations that wouldn’t exist without AI. The firm isn’t trying to compete in the most capital-intensive infrastructure layer, but is leaning instead into applied infrastructure and applications where proprietary data and clever distribution can create durable moats, Guleri told us. Global GDP is about $110 trillion, he noted, with roughly $6 trillion in agriculture — leaving more than $100 trillion in services and industries where he expects AI-driven efficiency gains to accrue. AI is “the wave that’s lifting everything on top of it,” he said. “There’s going to be a tremendous amount of value creation in the coming decades.” How a Google Brain co-founder builds and backs AI startupsAndrew Ng, managing general partner, AI Fund Google Brain and Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng is taking a more hands-on route to unique data via corporate partnerships at AI Fund, his venture studio launched in 2018. Corporate LPs including AES, HP, Mitsui & Co., Mitsubishi and others bring Ng and his AI Fund into highly specialized sectors — renewable energy, large-scale industrial operations, insurance and more — where internal data is both hard to access and critical to building defensible AI products. Many of AI Fund’s startup ideas, Ng said, come directly from these partners spotting gaps in huge but under-digitized markets. “It turns out a meaningful fraction of our startup ideas come from corporate partners that have spotted a market need, often in some sector of the economy, which is very large, very important but completely foreign to the typical consumer, or completely foreign to the typical AI engineer. I find that it’s been interesting how often we get to play in these spaces,” he said in our interview. “We think it’s wildly exciting, while no one else cares.” Venture firms Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates are also investors in the fund, but Ng said his fund’s strategy is differentiated from the traditional venture approach. “Unlike a traditional VC, our primary business activity is not to compete for deal flow,” he said. “Our primary business activity is to identify promising startup ideas, validate the market need and the customer need. Then we recruit a CEO to work alongside us to build a company.” Ng said he sees continued opportunities in specific verticals such as visual and voice AI: “It feels like AI is not one thing; it is many different things that are creating new opportunities.” GV on being willing to invest at AI’s premium valuationsDave Munichiello, managing partner at GV Then there’s GV, which has quietly become one of the most-active and -flexible corporate investors in AI. With Alphabet as its sole LP but independent on investment decisions, GV (formerly Google Ventures) has no qualms about backing startups that directly compete with Google’s own products — as it once did with Slack and is now doing with AI companies that go head-to-head with Alphabet’s internal initiatives. Tom Hulme, managing partner and head of Europe at GV Managing partners Dave Munichiello and Tom Hulme told us in our interview that they’re writing checks across the stack — from chips and compilers to applications — at both early and late stages. And, they’re willing to accept premium AI valuations when they believe the opportunity warrants it. “When we look at companies that are coming in to raise, the revenue run rate is insane. These companies are growing incredibly fast, faster than ever before,” Munichiello said. “And it’s very hard to spend a lot of time looking at AI applications companies, and then go back to looking at other companies.” Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Sector Snapshot: Real Estate Tech Funding Sees Slight Rebound, But Still Far Lower Than Peak Years
When interest rates were low, the amount of venture capital dollars flowing into the real estate technology space was high. The inverse of that is also proving to be true. As interest rates climbed in recent years, funding to the space plunged. But now in 2025, as rates have started to lower somewhat, venture dollars raised by real estate tech, or proptech, startups are inching upwards slightly compared to recent years. Capital is largely going to companies that either sit inside core workflows around payments, closings and procurement, or deliver explicit ROI via automation and artificial intelligence. But tech-enabled homebuilders are getting a piece of the pie, too. The broad trend: Even before the pandemic-fueled funding peaks, proptech startups received more than double the amount of venture funding in 2019 than they have in more recent years. While investors haven’t given up on proptech, funding to startups in the space is only slightly higher in 2025, and deal count is at a multiyear record low. Notably, private equity firms have been involved in three of the five largest deals in 2025. The numbers: So far in 2025, global real estate-related startups have pulled in about $10.2 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing, per Crunchbase data — down 57% from 2019, the second-highest year on record after the 2021 venture funding spike. Deal count is down 58.3% in 2025 compared to the high of 2,722 in 2021, the peak of the funding craze. The lower deal count signals both potentially decreased investor interest in the space, as well as larger round sizes. Noteworthy recent rounds Several large megadeals have taken place in 2025, many of them in the second half of the year. Unsurprisingly, AI surfaces in more than one deal. Just this month, Santa Clara, California-based tech-enabled homebuilder Homebound raised $400 million in new financing — $300 million in real estate capital (for the purchase of lots) and $100 million for its operating company. CEO and co-founder Nikki Pechet told Fortune that the company’s goal is to be “the Amazon of homes.” In its core markets, Homebound claims it is now building homes about 40% faster than its direct competitors, with build costs around 25% lower. It uses a proprietary AI platform that manages millions of data points across more than 1,000 distinct tasks required to deliver a home, from lot acquisition through move-in. The company says it has grown its topline by more than 4x since 2021, and margin dollars by more than 6x, and is on track to be profitable in 2026. The startup has raised nearly $530 million in capital since its 2018 inception. Investors include Thrive Capital, Gaingels, Khosla Ventures, Craft Ventures, Forerunner and Goldman Sachs, among others. In July, New York-based Bilt Rewards, whose platform aims to allow consumers to earn rewards on rent and daily neighborhood spend, raised $250 million at a $13 billion valuation in a round co-led by General Catalyst and real estate company GID. Impressively, that’s up from a valuation of $3.1 billion in January 2024. The company has raised over $800 million since it was founded in 2021, per Crunchbase data. Other backers include Eldridge Industries, Fifth Wall, Wells Fargo and Camber Creek. And in August, EliseAI netted a $250 million Series E financing at a $2.25 billion valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led that round, which also included participation from Sapphire Ventures, Navitas Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners. ElisaAI is focused on automating healthcare and housing systems. The New York-based company has raised nearly $392 million since its 2017 inception, per Crunchbase data. Its products include AI-guided tours, lease audits and a maintenance App designed to lower costs and improve tenant experiences, according to a report by Pymnts. Adam Wiener, former Redfin executive and current president of digital home finance startup Lower, told Crunchbase News that he believes proptech is “on the precipice of a massive transformation in the next year or two.” “The benefits of that transformation will accrue to the consumer,” he added. “AI applications will re-make the way we discover, buy, finance, and manage our homes, and there’s suddenly a new opportunity for a next generation of leaders to rise to the top of the proptech industry.” Other notable raises There were also a number of other interesting raises in the space over the course of the year that didn’t fall under the megadeal category. Many of their business models revolved on automating tasks as well as giving investors and homebuyers more options when it comes to purchasing or investing in homes. While there was a small rebound in 2025, it’s difficult to get too excited yet about the real estate technology funding outlook. Many of the biggest rounds were a mix of private equity and later-stage financings. Unless interest rates get meaningfully lower, we should probably expect more of the same in 2026. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman