Venture investments saw “unprecedented spending” on AI compute and frontier labs, as investors poured $300 billion into 6,000 startups during the first quarter of this year.
Notably, funding for startups in the first quarter of 2026 alone accounted for nearly 70% of the total venture capital invested throughout all of 2025, a report by Crunchbase noted. This quarterly figure also exceeded the annual investment totals seen in any year prior to 2018.
Much of the capital in Q1 was concentrated in artificial intelligence startups, with a significant share directed toward a small group of U.S.-based companies through record-breaking deals.
Four of the five largest venture funding rounds ever documented occurred during this period. Leading the group were frontier AI firms OpenAI ($122 billion), Anthropic ($30 billion), xAI ($20 billion), along …
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