Funding to foundational AI startups, also known as generative AI companies or frontier labs, has doubled in the first quarter of 2026 so far compared to all of 2025, Crunchbase data shows.
That funding is increasingly concentrated in a handful of fo...
Funding to foundational AI startups, also known as generative AI companies or frontier labs, has doubled in the first quarter of 2026 so far compared to all of 2025, Crunchbase data shows.
That funding is increasingly concentrated in a handful of foundational giants, including OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. In 2025 and early 2026, the market saw a shift to a small number of companies capturing a disproportionate share of global capital.
The broad trend: After three years of declining or flat venture investment, global startup overall funding grew year over year in 2025, Crunchbase data shows. Notably, year-over-year funding growth concentrated in the largest rounds and in the AI sector. Roughly 50% of all global venture funding in 2025 went to companies in AI-related fields, making artificial intelligence the leading sector for funding, as it was for the past three years.
Venture funding to AI overall reached $211 billion — up 85% year over year from $114 billion in 2024 — Crunchbase data shows. Funding to the AI sector in 2025 surpassed every year in the past decade, including the peak global funding year of 2021.
The numbers: As of March 31, foundational AI startups had raised $178 billion across 24 deals, compared with $88.9 billion across 66 deals in all of 2025 in a 100% increase. That’s also significantly higher — 466.9% higher to be exact — than the $31.4 billion raised across 52 deals in 2024.
By contrast, funding to foundational AI companies totaled just $23.2 billion in 2023 (a fraction of the size of OpenAI’s latest round) and a mere $1.4 billion in 2022.
Noteworthy rounds
Unsurprisingly, the two largest rounds in 2026 so far were raised by rivals OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) and Anthropic (maker of Claude).
Last month, OpenAI revealed that it’s raising an additional $10 billion in funding for its record-setting $110 billion megaround announced in February, bringing the total fundraise for the San Francisco-based company to over $120 billion. On March 31, it was reported that the round actually reached $122 billion. Backers in the latest financing include Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw, MGX, TPG and T. Rowe Price.
The first tranche of that round had already marked the largest venture funding deal of 2026 so far and the largest of all time, per Crunchbase data.
Also in February, generative AI company Anthropic announced it had raised $30 billion in a massive Series G funding round led by GIC and Coatue, valuing it at $380 billion post-money. With that round, San Francisco-based Anthropic has now raised nearly $64 billion since its 2021 inception, per Crunchbase.
The year kicked off with Elon Musk’s xAI, the generative AI startup known for its Grok chatbot and the parent company of X (formerly Twitter), securing $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.
Beyond the three largest generative AI giants, a smaller cohort of foundational AI startups are also raising significant sums of money.
Advanced Machine Intelligence, a startup co-founded by computer science pioneer and former Meta AI chief Yann LeCun, in March raised $1.03 billion to develop “world models,” or AI designed to learn from and interact with the physical world. The funding for Paris-based AMI represented the largest seed round ever for a European startup and one of the region’s largest fundings for an AI startup overall, per Crunchbase data. Bezos Expeditions, Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital and HV Capital led the funding, which reportedly values AMI at $3.5 billion.
After that, the next-largest raise so far is a $1 billion injection into World Labs, a San Francisco-based startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li that develops foundational models to generate and interact with the 3D world. Investors in that round included AMD, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity, Nvidia and Sea.
Exits and IPOs
The foundational AI sector is too young to have seen any significant exits yet. However, OpenAI in particular has done quite a bit of acquiring.
OpenAI has already made six acquisitions in 2026, nearly as many as it made in all of 2025, according to Crunchbase data. Its latest purchase took place on March 19, when it announced plans to acquire Astral, a creator of open-source tools for software developers. This month, it also snapped up Promptfoo, an open-source tool for testing AI applications.
Overall, the San Francisco-based company has acquired 17 companies in the past three years, Crunchbase data shows. Eight of those purchases were made in 2025, although it didn’t even start making acquisitions until April last year.
Meanwhile, data shows that Anthropic has been far less acquisitive. So far this year, it has made only one known purchase, buying Vercept, a 2-year-old software development startup. In 2025, Anthropic made two known acquisitions: Humanloop, an LLM evaluation platform for enterprises, and Bun, a JavaScript runtime for developing and managing web applications.
No foundational AI model company is currently public, though several are actively preparing to change that in late 2026 or sometime in 2027. The most likely candidates are the companies that have also raised the most capital: OpenAI and Anthropic.
Toronto-based Cohere, founded by ex-Google researchers, is also another possibility. That startup last August raised $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation. Inovia Capital and Radical Ventures co-led the round, which included participation from AMD Ventures, Nvidia, PSP Investments, Salesforce Ventures 1 and others.
The case of xAI is an interesting one. In early 2026, the company effectively merged its interests with SpaceX. As a result, the highly anticipated SpaceX IPO, expected in mid- to late-2026, will now be the primary vehicle for public investors to gain exposure to xAI’s foundational models.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
