Pro Weekly: AI Venture Funding Extends Hot Streak

The stock market had a rough start to the year. Artificial intelligence venture funding, however, is still on an upward trajectory. Startups in our Generative AI Database raised more than $18.8 billion in the first quarter, more than threefold with the same period last year. We logged 79 funding rounds across the 441 companies in our database.

To be sure, the data is skewed a bit by two giant funding rounds: OpenAI raised $10 billion in March and Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in March. That accounts for more than 70% of the overall funding the quarter. But even when you strip out deals larger than $1 billion, first-quarter funding jumped nearly 65% compared with the same period last year.