The Practical AI Showwith Olga Pechnenko and Chris Pearson
Week 29

Weekly AI Funding Report, Week 29

One Chinese Round Made A Cooling Market Look Like A Boom

AI raised $11.64B this week, 65.2% of every venture dollar. Almost two thirds of it was one company.

Covered on Episode 46 of the Practical AI Show. Source: Crunchbase, AI companies only.

AI funding this week
$11.64B
Share of all venture $
65.2%
AI companies funded
89
Biggest AI round
$7.4BDeepSeek

The week in brief

AI raised $11.64B, 65.2% of every venture dollar, across 89 AI companies out of 217 funded. But 64% of all AI funding is one company, DeepSeek’s $7.4B. Strip it out and the real AI market was $4.24B, down from $7.78B last week. One Chinese mega-round made a cooling market look like a boom.

Where the money went

  • China$8.89B

  • United States$1.34B

  • Asia-Pacific (ex$China) — $663.0M

  • Europe$545.0M

  • Middle East & Africa$130.0M

  • Latin America$38.0M

  • Rest of world$29.0M

The top five AI rounds

  1. DeepSeek $7.4B

    Series A · China

    Open-source LLM lab, China's answer to OpenAI. Its first-ever outside round; reported valuation north of $50B, now China's most valuable AI startup.

  2. Shihang Intelligent $1.0B

    Series A · China

    Water robots and intelligent unmanned marine equipment. Physical AI / robotics.

  3. Odyssey $310M

    Series B · United States

    General-purpose AI "world models", causal, multimodal simulations of how the real world behaves.

  4. SiliconFlow $296M

    Series B · Singapore

    Cloud platform for deploying and running large language and multimodal models. AI infrastructure.

  5. Sarvam AI $234M

    Series B · India

    India's sovereign-AI play, models and infrastructure built for Indian languages and enterprise.

  • One round defined the week. DeepSeek = 64% of AI dollars. Read past the headline.
  • Money pooled in China; deals spread in the US. China 76% on 10 deals; US 11.5% on 33 deals.
  • Early stage is busy. 34 Seed + 23 Series A rounds.
  • Physical AI keeps showing up. 7 robotics rounds, mostly marine/industrial, not humanoid hype.
  • The funding mirrors the news. US restricted its frontier (Fable 5 ban); China funded theirs at record size.