The Practical AI Showwith Olga Pechnenko and Chris Pearson
Week 28

Weekly AI Funding Report, Week 28

The Week AI Got Physical

The biggest AI check this week wasn't an AI company. It was a building.

Covered on Episode 45 of the Practical AI Show. Source: Crunchbase, AI companies only.

AI funding this week
$7.78B
Share of all venture $
51.4%
AI companies funded
77
Biggest round
$2.5BDayOne
Tracked so far
$365.2Bacross 28 weeks

The week in brief

AI raised $7.78B across 77 companies, 51.4% of all venture dollars. But $2.5B of that went to DayOne, a Singapore data-center operator. Add NEURA's $1.4B for robots and the pattern is loud: robots, and the buildings and chips that run them, took four of the top six rounds. Strip the DayOne data-center mega-round and the pure-AI market was $5.3B, still up ~53% from last week's $3.46B. The headline doubled. The real market grew by half. Either way, up.

Of 185 funded companies this week, 77 (41.6%) were AI, taking $7.78B of the $15.15B total raised (51.4%). The honest read: it looks like AI funding doubled vs last week's $3.46B, but $2.5B of that is one data-center round, not a model or an app. Strip DayOne and the pure-AI market was $5.3B, still up ~53%. Up either way. What's different is where the money went: not software, but the physical layer.

Where the money went

  • United States$2.62B

    Still the most companies, but it didn't own the dollars this week.

  • Asia-Pacific (ex$China) — $2.58B

    Nearly all of it is one round: DayOne's $2.5B data center in Singapore.

  • Europe$1.85B

    Carried by NEURA Robotics ($1.4B, Germany) and PhysicsX ($300M, London).

  • Middle East & Africa$341M

    Led by Cadena ($275M, Dubai).

  • Rest of world$331M

    (incl. Canada, Beacon $225M).

  • China$61M

    Nearly absent in dollars this week. Latin America: $0.

The top five AI rounds

  1. DayOne $2.5B

    Series C · Singapore · hyperscale data centers

    The buildings AI actually runs inside, power, cooling, and racks for cloud and AI workloads. The biggest check of the week is real estate, not a model.

    Press reports the full Series C closing at $4.5B; Crunchbase logs $2.5B for the June tranche. We use $2.5B.

  2. NEURA Robotics $1.4B

    Series C · Metzingen, Germany · full-stack robotics

    Collaborative and humanoid robots. Tether-backed, the largest round ever for a robotics company, NVIDIA, Amazon, Qualcomm, and Bosch all in.

  3. Supabase $500M

    Series F · San Francisco · developer / agentic infrastructure

    Open-source backend and database a huge share of AI apps get built on, now valued at $10.5B. Stripe and Salesforce doubled in. The plumbing under the app layer.

  4. Flourish Labs $500M

    Series A · New York · AI mental-health + coaching

    Combines humans, AI, and tech for employee coaching and peer mental-health support. The rare consumer/health-AI play in a week ruled by robots and infrastructure.

  5. Generalist AI $400M

    Series B · San Mateo · robotics foundation models

    NVIDIA- and Bezos-backed AI "brains" that let robots do real-world physical tasks. A $2B valuation on a Series B shows how hot embodied AI is right now.

Also notable: TensorWave $350M (AMD-exclusive AI cloud), PhysicsX $300M (AI engineering simulation), Standard Bots $200M (factory robots), Cadena $275M (AI cross-border sales, Dubai).

  • Physical AI took over. Four of the top six are robots or the data centers and chips that power them. The model/app layer barely cracked the top. This was the week AI stopped being software.
  • The biggest check was a building. DayOne's $2.5B is data-center infrastructure. The largest AI-tagged spend this week was power and real estate.
  • Robotics went mega at every stage. NEURA $1.4B (C) + Generalist AI $400M (B) + Standard Bots $200M (C). Embodied AI is writing nine-figure-plus checks early to late.
  • Geography flipped. The US didn't dominate dollars, Asia-Pacific and Europe each rivaled it. Three continents led the top three rounds.
  • AMD got a beachhead. TensorWave is an AMD-exclusive AI cloud, co-led by AMD Ventures, the first real funded challenger to the "it's all NVIDIA" story.