The Practical AI Showwith Olga Pechnenko and Chris Pearson
Week 41

Weekly AI Funding Report, Week 41

Four Companies Took Eighty Cents Of Every AI Dollar

AI raised $12.42B this week, nearly three times last week’s $4.87B.

Covered on Episode 56 of the Practical AI Show. Source: Crunchbase, AI companies only.

AI funding this week
$12.42B
Share of all venture $
51.7%
AI companies funded
71
Biggest AI round
$3.49BMistral AI
Tracked so far
$460.0Bacross 41 weeks

The week in brief

Four rounds cleared a billion dollars each, Mistral $3.49B, Crusoe $3.0B, Cognition $2.0B, Fluidstack $1.5B, and together they are 80% of every AI dollar raised. Now take those four out. The rest of the AI market raised $2.43B against $4.87B last week, a 50% drop, and the typical round fell from $15.0M to $9.9M. More money arrived and most companies got less of it.

Of 221 funded companies this week, 71 (32.1%) were AI, taking $12.42B of the $24.01B total (51.7%). The top five took 84.8% of AI dollars, against 54.8% last week, the most concentrated week in months. The median AI round fell to $9.9M from $15.0M, and 36 of the 71 rounds came in under $10M. A handful of enormous cheques at the top, a thinner market underneath.

Where the money went

  • United States$8.17B

    Back inside its normal band after last week’s 34.3%, and almost exactly the 41-week average of 66.3%. Three of the four billion-dollar rounds are American: Crusoe, Cognition, Fluidstack.

  • Europe$3.83B

    Mistral’s $3.49B is 91% of the entire region. Second is DCX Liquid Cooling at $176M in Warsaw. Without Mistral, Europe raised $339M, an ordinary week.

  • China$329.3M

    Biggest round is Micronano Core at $149M. China took 26.3% last week on two mega-rounds; the count held at 7 to 8 and only the cheque size collapsed.

  • Middle East & Africa$64.9M

    Saudi Arabia is three of the six. Israel is two, led by WINT at $36M.

  • Asia-Pacific (ex$China) — $14.1M

    Down from $1.01B, which last week was two robotics mega-rounds in Singapore and South Korea. This week’s largest is Hivebotics at $6M. Checked against the raw file: no South Korean AI rounds at all this week.

  • Latin America$10.0M

    Magnar $8M in Chile and UIN $2M in Argentina.

  • Rest of world$5.0M

    Both Canadian: askpolly $3M in Ottawa and Boundless Discovery $2M in Nova Scotia.

The top five AI rounds

  1. Mistral AI $3.49B

    Series D · Paris · ~$24.4B valuation · led by Samsung

    Builds AI models and the infrastructure to run them, and sells to governments and large companies that want a European alternative to the American models. EQT’s Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity co-led. It is the largest equity raise by any European tech company. Confirmed by Mistral on September 8.

  2. Crusoe $3.0B

    Series F · Denver · ~$30B valuation · reported

    Builds and runs AI data centers, including the power that feeds them. Co-led by Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners with Mubadala Capital in. Bloomberg and TechCrunch have it as closed on September 3; the company has not announced it.

  3. Cognition $2.0B

    Series E · San Francisco · $48B valuation · led by a16z and Accel

    Makes Devin, an AI that writes and ships software on its own rather than autocompleting for a human. Its own blog puts the revenue run rate at $492M in May and nearly $900M now, roughly doubled in four months. Announced September 8.

  4. Fluidstack $1.5B

    Private equity · New York · >$18B valuation · led by Jane Street · reported

    Rents GPU clusters to companies training large models, and is a supplier inside Google’s push against Nvidia. The valuation more than doubled from July. Forbes, September 3; no company release.

  5. Harvey $550M

    Series H · San Francisco · ~$15.6B valuation · co-led by Lightspeed and Diffusion · reported

    AI for legal work, research, document review, contract analysis, sold to law firms and corporate legal teams. It also acquired Guardrails AI in the same week. Bloomberg, September 9; no company release.

Also notable: Gimlet Labs $300M (San Francisco, infrastructure for running AI agent workloads) · DCX Liquid Cooling $176M (Warsaw, liquid cooling for AI data centers) · Forus $150M (New York, AI platform for medication access) · Micronano Core $149M (Hangzhou, AIoT chips) · Clay $115M (New York, go-to-market data platform for revenue teams) · WorldCom Hengqi $74.5M (Beijing, intelligent operating systems).

  • Four companies took eighty cents of every AI dollar. Mistral, Crusoe, Cognition and Fluidstack raised $9.99B of the week’s $12.42B. The top five took 84.8% against 54.8% last week, the most concentrated week in months.
  • Compute is the sector again, and robots are not. Compute and infrastructure took $5.23B, 42.1% of AI dollars. Robotics and physical AI took $207M, 1.7%, down from 43.3%. Fourteen robotics companies got funded, more than any other sector by count, and they raised under 2% of the money. The count stayed; the cheques left.
  • The typical round shrank while the total exploded. Median AI round fell $15.0M to $9.9M. Thirty-six of 71 rounds were under $10M and 30 were seed. Strip the four giants and the rest of the market raised $2.43B against $4.87B, down 50%.
  • Three of the four giants sell picks and shovels. Crusoe sells data centers, Fluidstack sells GPU capacity, Mistral sells models and infrastructure. Only Cognition sells something a business uses directly. The big money is still going into the layer underneath the applications.
  • Europe had one company; America had the rest. Mistral is 91% of Europe’s AI week and 28% of the world’s. Take it out and Europe raised $339M while the US took 65.8%, right on its 41-week average. Last week’s “the big cheques left America” pattern lasted exactly one week.