The Practical AI Showwith Olga Pechnenko and Chris Pearson
Week 37

Weekly AI Funding Report, Week 37

The Top Five Weren't Chatbots

AI took nearly half of every venture dollar this week.

Covered on Episode 52 of the Practical AI Show. Source: Crunchbase, AI companies only.

AI funding this week
$10.61B
Share of all venture $
45.9%
AI companies funded
68
Biggest AI round
$2BFirmus
Tracked so far
$429.5Bacross 37 weeks

The week in brief

$10.61B across 68 companies, or 45.9% of all funding, up from 23.8% last week. But the five biggest AI checks went to data centers, factories, training tools, a national cloud, and a firm that buys ordinary businesses and runs them with AI. Not a model or a chatbot in the set. And the jump is narrower than it looks: strip the four billion-dollar rounds and the market grew 21%, while the median round actually shrank.

Of 178 funded companies this week, 68 (38%) were AI, taking $10.61B of the $23.1B total (45.9%). Against last week's $3.42B that reads as a tripling, but four billion-dollar rounds did the work: strip them and the week was $4.13B, up 21%. Meanwhile fewer AI companies were funded than last week (76 → 68) and the median round fell from $13.0M to $10.75M. The top five rounds are 69% of all AI dollars. A week of concentration, not a broad surge.

Where the money went

  • United States$6.75B

    Thrive, Hadrian, River AI, Lumilens and Source Foundry are 82% of it.

  • Asia-Pacific (ex$China) — $2.84B

    Firmus and ZanKore alone are 99% of the region; the other eight raised $31.8M between them.

  • Europe$824M

    Lovable ($400M, Stockholm) and Cambridge Aerospace ($300M, UK) are 85%.

  • China$108M

    No round above $15M, and six of the nine were the same ¥100M round converted.

  • Middle East & Africa$80M

    , both Israel: Corma $60M, Attestable $20M.

  • Rest of world$5.6M

    , both Canadian: Fisent $4.3M, TetraGen Robotics $1.29M.

  • Latin America$0

    Two Latin American companies were funded and neither is AI.

The top five AI rounds

  1. Firmus Technologies $2B

    Strategic equity · Sydney · $10.5B valuation · AI data centers

    Builds liquid-cooled data centers designed to get the most AI output per dollar of electricity. Nvidia and Coatue came back in, with Blackstone and Jane Street joining. Its valuation roughly doubled in four months.

  2. Thrive Holdings $2B

    Private equity · New York · $12B valuation · AI roll-up

    Not an AI product company. It buys ordinary service businesses, accounting firms, IT shops, and rewires them with AI. Backed by SoftBank, D1 Capital and Altimeter, with OpenAI among its investors.

  3. Hadrian $1.37B

    Series D · Torrance, CA · automated factories

    AI-run factories that machine precision parts for defense, aerospace and space. Co-led by WCM, Washington Harbour, Valor Equity, 137 Ventures and Baillie Gifford.

  4. River AI $1.1B

    Series A · Palo Alto · training infrastructure

    Sells the API companies use to fine-tune models on their own data. The company is two months old. General Catalyst and AMP PBC led, with Nvidia and AMD Ventures in.

  5. ZanKore $800M

    Corporate round · Jakarta · national AI cloud

    An AI compute platform for Indonesia, led by Qatar's Ooredoo taking a 49% stake, built with Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, Nokia and Nvidia. Equity plus a development commitment, not a pure venture round.

Also notable: Lumilens $700M (replacing data-center wiring with light) · Lovable $400M at a $13.3B valuation, roughly double its December round (builds web apps from a plain-English prompt) · Source Foundry $400M (AI-chip manufacturing tools) · Cambridge Aerospace $300M (anti-drone interceptors) · Neros $250M (military drones) · CodeRabbit $143M (AI code review).

  • None of the top five is a model company. Data centers, a business roll-up, factories, training tools, a national cloud. Four rounds cracked $1B after a week where none did.
  • Infrastructure took nearly half of every AI dollar. Ten companies, $5.06B, 47.7%. Second straight week the layer underneath AI out-raised AI applications.
  • The average tripled while the median fell. $44.9M → $156.0M average, $13.0M → $10.75M median, on fewer companies. That is concentration, not growth.
  • Foreign money built AI capacity abroad. Nvidia, Coatue and Blackstone into Australia; Qatar's Ooredoo into Indonesia. Two rounds outraised Europe, China and Israel combined.
  • China went quiet. $108M across nine companies, none above $15M, down from $312M.
  • The biggest check still wasn't AI. A $4.69B Sony/TSMC joint venture that makes smartphone image sensors. Always check what's actually under the "AI" label.