The Practical AI Showwith Olga Pechnenko and Chris Pearson
Week 45

Weekly AI Funding Report, Week 45

A $400M Bet On Paying You For Your Data. Eighty-Nine Cents To America.

AI raised $3.02B this week, and 89 cents of every dollar went to US companies. The biggest check, $400M, is a bet that people get paid when AI companies license their data.

Covered on Episode 60 of the Practical AI Show. Source: Crunchbase, AI companies only.

AI funding this week
$3.02B
Share of all venture $
30.8%
AI companies funded
72
Biggest AI round
$400MSignSplit
Tracked so far
$479.2Bacross 45 weeks

The week in brief

Last week carried Instinct’s $1B. Strip it out and the everyday AI market went $3.79B to $3.02B, down 20.2%. Fewer companies got funded, 80 to 72, but the typical round grew from $10.0M to $12.2M. No AI round cleared $400M. AI’s share fell to 30.8% even though total venture money rose, from $9.46B to $9.81B.

Of 180 funded companies this week, 72 (40.0%) were AI, taking $3.02B of the $9.81B total (30.8%). Eight AI rounds of $100M or more took 61.4% of AI dollars, down from 13 rounds and 80.8% last week. The top five took 46.5%, down from 52.2%. Two non-AI rounds, Axiom ($2.0B) and Eni Plenitude ($1.75B, an Italian energy retailer), are 38.3% of all dollars. Without them, AI is 49.9% of what is left.

Where the money went

  • United States$2.69B

    Down from $4.13B, but a bigger share than last week’s 86.3%. The ten biggest AI rounds all went to US companies, led by SignSplit, Biohub and Armadin.

  • Europe$230.5M

    Down slightly from $243.9M, with 20 companies against 18. Six Paris companies took $89.2M, 38.7% of the region. Hadrian ($40M, Amsterdam, offensive security) is the biggest.

  • Rest of world$65.0M

    Both Canadian: Mecka AI ($60M, Markham, data for physical AI) and Apero ($5M, Quebec).

  • Asia-Pacific (ex-China)$30.8M

    OnebyZero ($20M, Singapore, AI consulting) is about two thirds of it.

  • Middle East & Africa$2.4M

    AntSeed, Israel, a marketplace for running AI models.

  • Latin America$1.7M

    BioLinker, São Paulo, AI for protein production.

  • China$0

    Last week had four companies and $182.7M. The only Chinese venture round in the data is Sukos ($6.0M, chip equipment, not AI). Crunchbase adds late announcements, so this may be a gap in the data rather than a real zero.

The top five AI rounds

  1. SignSplit $400M

    Seed commitment · New York · $1B valuation · W Group

    SignSplit lets people license their data, work and likeness to AI, robotics and media companies and get paid, with consent and usage terms attached. It came out of stealth on October 5 with W Group as its only investor.

    A commitment, not a wire. The release says it combines capital with a multi-year package of strategic resources and does not say how much is cash.

  2. Biohub $300M

    Corporate round · Redwood City, California · Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta

    Biohub is a nonprofit building AI models that predict how a human cell behaves. The three companies are putting in $300M together, part of a larger expansion with the US Department of Energy and NIH.

    A pledge to a nonprofit research organization, filed by Crunchbase as a corporate round.

  3. Armadin $255.5M

    Series B · Palo Alto · over $2.5B valuation · co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel

    Armadin, led by Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia, sells AI that attacks a company’s own systems to find the weak spots before real attackers do.

  4. Vinci $250M

    Series B · Palo Alto · $1.5B valuation · co-led by Advent, Temasek and Xora

    Vinci makes software that predicts how a chip or machine behaves physically before anyone builds it. It started with heat in semiconductors and plans to cover memory, vehicles, aircraft and satellites.

  5. PaleBlueDot AI $200M

    Series C · Palo Alto · $3.2B valuation · led by ComputeCore

    PaleBlueDot rents out AI computing power: its own GPU clusters, a marketplace of other providers’ capacity, and on-demand inference.

    The company says it has signed more than $5B in customer contracts. That figure is not audited.

Also notable: Valon $150M (mortgage servicing software) · Supabase $150M (open source database backend for app builders) · Matchpoint Therapeutics $150M (drug discovery) · Nous Research $90M (open-source AI models) · OptimizeGEO.ai $80M (helps brands show up in AI answers) · Multiply Labs $75M (robots that make biologic drugs) · Mecka AI $60M (data for physical AI).

  • Data got paid. SignSplit, Mecka AI and Halluminate, which sell or build the data AI learns from, took $490.0M, 16.2% of AI dollars.
  • Biology took a fifth. Biohub, Matchpoint, Multiply Labs, Sensible Biotechnologies, WhiteLab Genomics and Rivercell raised $603.0M, 20.0% of AI dollars.
  • Late stage went quiet. Only two AI rounds were Series C or later, PaleBlueDot and Valon: $350M, 11.6% of AI dollars. Seed took $720.1M, and SignSplit is more than half of that.
  • Security took a tenth. Armadin, Hadrian, Osavul and Right-Hand Cybersecurity raised $308.0M, 10.2% of AI dollars.
  • China had no AI round. Zero AI rounds of $1M or more in the data, after four companies and $182.7M last week.