The Practical AI Showwith Olga Pechnenko and Chris Pearson
Week 27

Weekly AI Funding Report, Week 27

The Week After The Circus

The week after the $50B headline, AI funding came back to earth.

Covered on Episode 44 of the Practical AI Show. Source: Crunchbase, AI companies only.

AI funding this week
$3.46B
Share of all venture $
37.7%
AI companies funded
67
Biggest round
$410MDriveNets
Tracked so far
$357.4Bacross 27 weeks

The week in brief

This week AI raised $3.46B across 67 companies, 37.7% of all venture dollars, with no mega-round (biggest was $410M). But here's the real read: last week's $52.3B was 95.5% one Anthropic round. Strip Anthropic out and last week's market was $2.35B. So apples-to-apples, $2.35B → $3.46B: the broad AI market actually grew ~47%. The headline crashed. The actual market didn't.

Where the money went

  • United States$1.82B

    Still the center of gravity.

  • Middle East & Africa$614M

    Tiny count, huge dollars: an Israeli AI-infra + security cluster (DriveNets $410M, Coralogix $200M).

  • China$430M

    Robotics-heavy.

  • Asia-Pacific (ex$China) — $242M

  • Europe$229M

    Most companies, smallest checks.

  • Rest of world$133M

    (incl. Canada). Latin America: $0 this week.

The top five AI rounds

  1. DriveNets $410M

    Series D · Ra'anana, Israel · AI networking infrastructure

    Builds the networking that ties thousands of AI chips together inside data centers. The unglamorous plumbing the whole AI boom runs on.

  2. Suno $400M

    Series D · Cambridge MA · AI music generation

    Type a prompt, get a full song. The consumer-famous one, and the one fighting the record labels over training data.

  3. AlphaSense $350M

    New York · AI market intelligence

    An AI research engine for finance: reads millions of filings, transcripts, and reports so analysts don't have to. AI replacing the grunt work of research.

  4. Cyera $300M

    Series G · New York / Israel · AI data security

    Uses AI to find and protect sensitive data across a company's cloud. As companies feed more data to AI, securing it becomes the next big spend.

  5. Spirit AI $222M

    Series A · Beijing · robotics / embodied AI

    Builds AI brains for robots that act in the physical world. A $222M Series A signals how hot embodied AI is right now.

  • Physical AI is the theme. Robotics and embodied AI everywhere, Spirit AI, Astribot ($148M), Tripo (3D, $200M). The money is moving from screens to the real world.
  • Infra + security cluster. DriveNets, Cyera, Coralogix, ZutaCore (chip cooling). Picks-and-shovels for the AI build-out.
  • Early stage is roaring. 17 Series A's ($834M) and 27 seed rounds. New AI companies are still being born fast.
  • Israel punches way above its weight. 3 companies, $614M, second only to all of North America.
  • No mega-round = the market's true baseline. When no $10B+ round hides the data, you see the real, broad pulse of AI funding. It's healthy.