€128 billion. That's how much venture capital flowed globally in 2025, with AI startups capturing 41% of every euro invested. Two out of five venture deals went to artificial intelligence companies.
Carta's data leaves no room for doubt: AI companies now dominate the investment landscape in ways we've never seen. The question isn't whether this is happening — it's why investors keep writing nine-figure checks for machine learning.
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📊 The New Kings of Venture Capital
Three companies sit at the top of this pyramid, collectively rewriting the rules of private investment. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk's xAI raised the largest funding rounds in venture capital history. €37B OpenAI - Series C
€28B Anthropic - Series G
€18.5B xAI - Series E
Why So Much Money?
"AI startups aren't raising massive rounds because they have tons of employees — they don't — but because the operational costs of running AI models are enormous," explains Peter Walker from Carta. Compute costs drive everything. Every time someone asks ChatGPT or Claude a question, the company pays for computational power. Scale that to billions of monthly queries, and the numbers explode.📖 Read more: Greek Startups 2026: Which Ones Stand Out?
⚡ The New Wave of AI Investment
Looking closer at the data reveals a clear trend: AI's share of venture capital jumped to nearly 50% in 2025, up from 34% in 2024. We're talking about €188 billion total flowing into the sector. Foundation model companies raised €74 billion in 2025, representing 40% of all AI investment. That's double the 2024 figure.
The most striking fact: OpenAI and Anthropic alone captured 14% of global venture capital in 2025. Two companies. Out of the entire planet.
American Dominance
€148 billion — 79% of all AI investment — landed in American companies. The San Francisco Bay Area alone absorbed €113 billion. This geographic concentration isn't random. Silicon Valley creates a network effect: the best researchers meet the best investors, who meet the best technical teams. The result is a self-reinforcing acceleration loop.🧠 What They Do With The Money
Instead of traditional investments in hiring and marketing, AI startups target something different: infrastructure. Anthropic committed €46 billion to American computing infrastructure — building data centers in Texas and New York. Amazon constructed a dedicated 1,200-acre campus in Indiana, costing €10 billion."Fewer bets, but more capital in each one"
Peter Walker, Carta
Claude Code: Success Within Success
A product that didn't exist in 2023 now generates €2.3 billion in annual revenue. Anthropic's Claude Code, an AI agent for programming, quadrupled enterprise subscriptions in January 2026 alone. Over 500 customers spend more than €920,000 annually on Claude. The number of clients spending above €92,000 increased sevenfold within one year.📖 Read more: 3D Printing in Schools: AI and VR Learning
🚀 The Role of Corporate Investors
The investor composition reveals a shift. Companies like Meta, SpaceX, NVIDIA, Disney, and Google lead billion-euro rounds. Meta led a €13.3 billion investment in Scale AI, with roughly 10 core team members — including CEO Alexandr Wang — transitioning to Meta. However, the biggest money comes from private equity and alternative investors. SoftBank led 2025's largest deal with a €37 billion investment in OpenAI.The K-Shaped Venture Market
"The market has become K-shaped or bifurcated," notes Carta's analysis. Capital concentrates in a few selected firms backing a handful of companies, while everyone else is "just there."Megaround Dominance
58% of AI funding involves rounds above €460 million
Enterprise Focus
Enterprises represent 80% of Anthropic's revenue
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🎯 Returns So Far
The performance data tells a different story. Funds established in 2023 and 2024 — after ChatGPT's launch — show the highest internal rate of return (IRR) compared to funds created between 2017-2020. But there's a catch. Newer funds might look good on paper because if they invested in a seed round and the company raised Series A at a higher valuation, it appears as high returns in a short timeframe. "This inflates the IRR," Walker admits. "It's also likely that recent fund portfolios are packed with AI-native startups in ways that 2020/2021 fund portfolios aren't."Truth Will Emerge Later
Time will tell whether this early enthusiasm translates into real returns for investors through exits like blockbuster IPOs or major acquisitions. Or if we're simply in the hype phase of a bubble that will eventually burst. Menlo Ventures data shows enterprise AI revenue reached €34 billion in 2025, tripling from the previous year.🔮 What's Coming in 2026
Expectations for 2026 run high. OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI have teased IPOs for this year that have left investors salivating. One trend worth watching: Will top model developers continue raising tens of billions through equity investments to feed their voracious appetite for compute in 2026? Or will partnerships fill this gap? Hyperscalers committed an estimated €278+ billion in capex for 2025 and have increased this commitment for 2026. Meanwhile, three venture funds — Lightspeed Venture Partners, Founders Fund, and Andreessen Horowitz — led billion-euro AI rounds in 2025.
The global venture capital market rebounded in 2025 after slower years in 2024 and 2023. The data shows the extent to which AI dominated the venture landscape in 2025, with capital concentrating in the largest startups.
The picture forming is clear: artificial intelligence isn't just another sector in venture capital. It **is** venture capital right now. And everything suggests this situation will intensify in 2026.
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