CB Insights reports total venture funding rebounded to $469 billion in 2025, up 47% year over year and the highest level since 2022, driven almost entirely by mega-rounds, which surged 77% to 738 deals capturing $307 billion, 65% of all funding, even as overall deal count fell 17% to 29,501, with US startups alone raising $328 billion, 70% of global funding. AI companies captured $226 billion, 48% of total venture funding, the largest share on record, with the six largest rounds of the year, OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale, xAI, Databricks, and Aligned, together representing 49% of all AI funding and 24% of total venture capital, while robotics separately raised a record $40.7 billion, 9% of all funding, led by industrial humanoid robots. Valuations at the very top skyrocketed unevenly, Anthropic jumped 19x in a single year to $350 billion while OpenAI rose 218% to $500 billion, and among CB Insights' top-performing Smart Money VCs, led by General Catalyst with 213 deals, all ten most active investment markets were AI-focused, signaling a narrowing toward concentrated AI bets.

Founders outside the AI mega-round tier get a stark, quantified picture of just how concentrated 2025 funding really was, since deal count actually fell 17% even as total dollars hit a post-2022 high, meaning the recovery headline masks a genuinely tougher fundraising environment for the typical non-AI, non-mega-round company. LPs evaluating fund managers get a useful diagnostic in the finding that even CB Insights' own top-performing Smart Money VCs now concentrate all ten of their most active markets in AI, a genuinely notable shift away from the sector diversification traditionally used to manage venture risk, worth weighing when assessing a fund's current strategy against its historical track record. The Figure example, a $39 billion valuation on zero revenue, is also a concrete, checkable case study for anyone trying to gauge whether physical AI and robotics valuations reflect genuine commercial traction or speculative momentum, a useful benchmark to revisit as that sector matures.