In 2025, the Bay Area expanded its dominance of U.S. seed funding — capturing a growing share of both deals and dollars — even as most startups remained geographically dispersed, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows, resulting in a more bifurcated landscape.
Insider Brief PRESS RELEASE — Nace.AI has announced it has raised $21.5 million in seed funding, led by Walden Catalyst with participation from General Catalyst and a group of leading institutional and angel investors. Alongside the raise, the company is launching its new product in research preview, a new model for professional work where 100+ specialized AI agents […]
So far in 2026, companies in sales, marketing and CRM categories have pulled in around $2.7 billion globally in seed- through growth-stage funding, per Crunchbase data.
Crunchbase News interviews Kevin Tsang, managing director of Amex Ventures, about the firm’s investment thesis, the kinds of startups it aims to back, and how it works with founders to build and scale projects with a vision toward becoming a "global agentic concierge."
Large U.S. venture deals this week were led by a massive defense tech raise for space security startup True Anomaly. We also saw sizable deals for startups applying AI to fintech, marketing, customer service, health care and developer tools.
Venture funding of AI companies in 2026 will easily smash funding records set in 2025, with some heavy deals already consummated in the first quarter, according to market researchers.
Data from Crunchbase shows that $300 billion poured into 6,000 startups worldwide during the first quarter of 2026. That’s a quarterly record for venture funding in AI companies, a Crunchbase news report said.
A study from S&P Global measured generative AI funding reaching over $140 billion in the first quarter of 2026, outpacing all of 2025, according to a story published on the company’s website. Amid economic concerns, inflation, and the war in Iran, there were fewer deals overall, but the funding rounds were large in scope compared to any made in 2025.
X.AI, for example, kicked off 2026 with a series-E round of $20 billion. OpenAI received $122 billion in a massive funding round in March, with a valuation of $852 billion. Anthropic received $30 billion in one round of funding that valued the company a
More than half of seed dollars last year went into deals of $10 million or above. At the same time, deal counts for seed-stage startups have fallen since the 2021-2022 peak, as has funding going into rounds below $10 million, Crunchbase data shows.
We recently spoke with Tiffany Luck, a partner at New Enterprise Associates about the increasing relevance of vertical AI, how startups can carve out durable advantages in a world dominated by platform giants, and more.
