AI Startups Capture Record 41% of $128B Venture Haul - The Tech Buzz

AI is eating venture capital — and it is not sharing

The venture capital industry has a concentration problem. Not a subtle one.

According to data from Carta published this week, AI startups accounted for 41 percent of the $128 billion in venture dollars raised by companies on its platform in 2025 — a record-high annual share. Ten percent of startups captured half of all funding. The median round is not rising; the outlier rounds are so large that they distort the entire distribution.

The Carta data covers 2025. But the AI mega-rounds that most dramatically illustrate the concentration came in early 2026: OpenAI raised $110 billion in a single round on February 27, Anthropic raised $30 billion in Series G on February 12 at a $380 billion valuation, and xAI raised $20 billion in Series E on January 6. These three companies alone represent more capital than most sectors of the global economy see in a year. They are also all preparing for IPOs that would further reshape the market.

The $128 billion Carta figure comes from the firm's VC Fund Performance Q4 2025 full report. Carta's own summary page cites approximately $120 billion for the year, an $8.5 billion gap likely reflecting different datasets within Carta's platform. The story uses the full-report figure as reported by TechCrunch, which directly cites Carta's fund performance data.

"The cost of running AI models is high," Peter Walker, head of insights at Carta, told TechCrunch. "Fewer bets, but more capital. AI startups are raising bigger rounds not because they have lots of employees — they don't."

This is the structural reality of foundation model companies: they are capital-intensive in a way that earlier software companies were not, because the compute cost of training and inference does not scale linearly with headcount. A company with 500 employees can raise a $10 billion round. The unit economics of AI make size a function of capital deployment, not team size.

The returns question is genuinely open

There is a plausible bull case for what is happening. The Carta data shows that funds raised in 2023 and 2024 — the cohorts assembled after the ChatGPT launch — are posting the highest internal rates of return compared with the declining IRR of funds raised between 2017 and 2020. If you believe that AI companies will produce exits at current valuations, the capital concentration makes sense. The early funds are performing.

Walker himself is careful about that conclusion. Newer funds may look good on paper because early-stage investments that subsequently raised at higher valuations show paper returns that have not yet been tested by actual exits. A seed investor in Anthropic looks brilliant. A seed investor in the 1,000 other AI companies that will not reach that scale looks like a lesson in concentration risk.

"It is also likely that the portfolios of the more recent vintage funds are full of AI-native startups in a way that the portfolios of 2021 or 2020 funds are not," Walker said. The IRR data is real; what it predicts about actual returns is not yet knowable.

The K-shaped venture market

What the Carta data describes is a venture market that has bifurcated. On one side: a handful of foundation model and AI infrastructure companies that command so much capital they function almost as a separate asset class. On the other side: everyone else, competing for a diminishing share of a pie that is being consumed by the top.

This is not a new story in venture — concentration has been a trend for years. But the speed and scale of the AI version is different. The three companies that dominate the AI infrastructure layer — OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI — are raising rounds that are an order of magnitude larger than the largest rounds in the previous venture cycle. They are also, all three, preparing to go public, which means the question of whether the valuations are justified by actual business performance is about to be tested in public markets for the first time.

The IPO pipeline is the real stress test. If OpenAI and Anthropic can demonstrate, as public companies, that their revenue growth justifies their valuations, the bull case for AI venture holds. If they cannot — if the revenue growth slows, or the path to profitability remains obscured by compute costs — the IRR of the 2023 and 2024 vintage funds will look less like a return on skill and more like a return on momentum.

The venture market is making a concentrated bet on AI. Whether it is a bet on the technology or a bet on the hype is a question that public markets will answer first.