Five Billion Dollars For A Company With No Product

AI funding this week

$11.71B

Share of all venture $

64%

AI companies funded

86

Biggest round

$5BSSI

Tracked so far

$415.5Bacross 35 weeks

The week in brief

AI raised $11.71B across 86 companies, 64% of every venture dollar, the biggest AI share since June 18. But $8.5B of it was two rounds: NVIDIA's $5B into Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence, and $3.5B into China's Moonshot AI. SSI has no product, no revenue, and no released model, with about 50 employees. Strip the giants out of this week and last, and the ordinary market went $2.08B → $3.21B, with 86 companies funded instead of 58. Underneath the headline checks, more companies are getting funded.

Of 209 funded companies this week, 86 (41%) were AI, taking $11.71B of the $18.22B raised, 64.3%. Raw week-over-week that's $3.78B → $11.71B, up 210%. But the honest comparison strips the giant round from each week: last week without Atoms was $2.08B across 57 companies, this week without SSI and Moonshot is $3.21B across 84. The real market is up about 54%, and the count of AI companies funded is up 48%.

Where the money went

• United States$6.52B55.7% of AI dollars · 45 companies

  SSI's $5B is 77% of the US total. Strip it and the US raised $1.52B across 44 companies.

• China$4.00B34.1% · 9 companies

  Highest China share since June 18, but Moonshot is 88% of it. The other eight raised $497M combined.

• Europe$874M7.5% · 17 companies

  Multiverse Computing's $569.6M in Spain is two thirds of Europe's week.

• Middle East & Africa$165M1.4% · 3 companies

  All Israel; groundcover's $100M led.

• Asia$Pacific ex-China — $146M1.3% · 9 companies

  Japan's ASUENE and India's BusinessNext led.

• Rest of world$8M0.1% · 2 companies

  , including Canada.

• Latin America$1M0.0% · 1 company

  Einship, in Brazil.

The top five AI rounds

1. Safe Superintelligence $5.0B

   NVIDIA · Palo Alto · foundational AI

   Ilya Sutskever co-founded OpenAI, was its chief scientist, and sat on the board that fired Sam Altman. He left to build one thing: a safe superintelligence, with nothing shipped before it. NVIDIA just put in $5 billion. SSI has no product, no revenue, no released model and no published research, with roughly 50 employees. Its last public valuation was $32 billion.

2. Moonshot AI $3.5B

   Beijing · large language models

   The company behind Kimi, one of China's leading chat models. The round was oversubscribed and reportedly values them near $35 billion, up from a reported $20 billion in May. Backed by China's National AI Industry Investment Fund, with Alibaba, Tencent and Meituan as earlier investors.

3. Multiverse Computing $569.6M

   Series C · San Sebastián, Spain · model compression

   Their product, CompactifAI, uses quantum-inspired math to shrink large AI models so they run cheaper and on smaller hardware, a phone or a factory sensor instead of a data center. Co-led by Forgepoint Capital International, BNPP Solar Impulse Venture Fund and Bullhound Capital, at a reported €1.5B pre-money.

   The company's own wording is "targeting up to," not closed.

4. Etched $300M

   Series C · San Jose · AI chips · $10.3B valuation

   Etched builds one chip that does one thing: run transformer models. Not a general-purpose GPU. By burning the transformer architecture straight into the silicon, their Sohu chip aims to run today's AI models far faster and cheaper than NVIDIA hardware can. Led by Sequoia, with a16z, Jane Street and SK Hynix.

5. HiDream.ai $221.6M

   Series C · Beijing · image generation

   Text-to-image generation and AI image editing, China's answer to Midjourney. Co-led by ICBC Capital and Shanghai Dunhong Asset.

   Press only, reported by funding trackers, no direct company announcement found.

Also notable: Spur Intelligence $200M (bot detection, led by Insight Partners), Eliyan $145M (chip-to-chip interconnect), Onyx Security $113M (security for AI systems), SenseTime $100M (AI for hospitals), groundcover $100M (observability), Enigma $71M seed (human-robot interaction, the biggest seed of the week).

Trends

• Two checks, three quarters of the week. $8.5B of $11.71B. The average AI round was $136M; the median was $8M. That gap is the whole story.
• AI took 64% of all venture money. Not just AI dollars rising, AI's slice of everything rising, to the biggest share since June 18.
• China came back on one round. 34% of global AI dollars from nine companies, and Moonshot is 88% of it. One champion got funded, not a market.
• Seed is crowded and cheap. 35 AI seed rounds, $417M total, median $5.7M. Seed and Series A were 62% of every AI company funded but only 7.3% of the dollars.
• The money moved to running models, not training them. Etched $300M, Multiverse $569.6M, Eliyan $145M, Yuanli $103M, ChipAgents $60M, chips, compression, and bandwidth. The expensive problem is inference now.
• AI security is its own sector. Spur $200M, Onyx $113M, AegisAI $36M, Mate $35M, Hush $30M. Onyx and Hush both exist to secure AI agents and non-human identities.