AI Investments surged 62% to $110 billion in 2024, but startup funding fell 12% overall, Dealroom said

Venture capitalists gobbles term sheets for startups exercising artificial intelligence when it comes to funding a wider range of technologies.

According to new figures from Analytics Firm Dealroom, AI startups raised $110 billion last year, up 62% the previous year. At the same time, individually-backed companies across the technology spectrum (startups and scale-ups) raised $227 billion in 2024, down 12% from 2023 figures.

Dealroom founder Yoram Wijngaarde has been analyzing and counselling in the tech industry for decades. The marketplace had a moment of barnstorming in terms of investor attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but it was not even close to the impact AI had on investments in terms of activity and value. “This is the biggest wave of history from investing absolute amounts,” he said. “There was no such thing.”

Part of the reason seems to be the fact that there is a wider ecosystem touched on it, covering hardware and infrastructure, applications, underlying models, and more.

A list of some of the biggest AI companies, raised in 2024, speaks to a variety of areas that are currently attracting attention. Humanity (Large Language Models, Generated AI), Waymo (Automatic Driving), Anduril (Defense), Xai (Applications), Databricks (Data processing and management data, especially AI data), Vantage (Datacenters and infrastructure ( Datacenters and infrastructure) should train and query the promoted growth data) is one of the biggest and biggest fundraisers of 2024.

Openai now feels like a kid on AI posters, but last year he didn’t raise much of his money. Openai won $10 billion with Databricks.

However, with more than $20 billion and more than $40 billion reportedly reportedly reported during work, Openai, a large-scale virus app in the form of ChatGpt, has now become an industry It has now become a representation of a kind of precursor.

And of course, its two biggest business interests, the basic AI and generation AI, appear to be the engine under all VC activity, and Genai companies raised $47.4 billion in 2024 , AI technology is the most growing (and overtaking A AI applications (and A AI technology) over the past two years, a huge slice of fundraising).

The dealroom report was asked to match a weekly AI event in Paris around the French government’s AI Action Summit. Part of the event agenda focuses on the issue of how to advocate for fairer AI development in more markets beyond the US

For those who believe AI companies are supported outside of their marketplace, Dealroom figures bare how it works. 42% ($80.7 billion) of VCs raised in the US cost just 25% ($12.8 billion) in Europe, less than 18% worldwide, went to AI startups . China was outstanding last year with a $7.6 billion investment.

“In Europe there’s a bit of an innovator’s dilemma,” says Wijngaarde. “We don’t want to replace what we have.

How will AI funding be made in 2024 in 2025?

One of the reasons why AI startups have raised a lot of money is because of the cost of building and operating these services. Computing infrastructure requires a large language model to build and execute. The emergence of Deepseek and other projects like this Build a rival to the Openai model for just $50 We present an alternative approach built on open source. Is that something we can see?

So far, the outlook for open source companies has been rather modest, even with the large presence of Mistral (charging itself as open source) and meta efforts in Europe.

According to Dealroom, about 12% of AI VC funding last year went to startups that built open source AI. “But there’s a fair amount of grey territory in whether it’s considered open source,” Orla Browne, head of that insight, told me. “For example, Xai is not included in these numbers. GROK-1 is open source, so GROK-2 is not currently. If you include only Xai, the percentage increases to 22%.”

For AI startups that are trying to match the VCs that are most interested in the field, AIN discovered Antler made the most investment in the sector last year, followed by A16Z, General It turns out that Catalyst, Sequoia and Khosla Ventures are ongoing. Top 5.