The percentage of U.S. startup funding going to rounds of $100 million or more reached an all-time high in 2025. It’s a development that should surprise no one who has been following the rise of AI megarounds.
An estimated 70% of all U.S. startup funding 1 this year went to jumbo-sized financings of $100 million and up, per Crunchbase data. That equates to around $157 billion spread across more than 300 reported rounds.
For a sense of how that compares to prior years, we took a look at the share of investment to these big rounds over the past eight years.
How 2025 compares to the last peak
Notably, this year’s tally is not the highest dollar sum on record. That title goes to 2021, the peak of the last bull market.
Four years ago, a red-hot IPO market, soaring tech stock prices, and startup investors’ ample appetite for writing big checks helped send funding totals to stratospheric levels. While much of that went to prominent unicorns, early stage dealmaking was also way up.
This year, by contrast, a few big names are taking a much larger share of the funding pie. The largest deal — OpenAI’s unprecedented $40 billion SoftBank-backed financing — alone accounts for roughly a quarter of all funding to $100 million+ megarounds.
Investment is also, of course, much more heavily concentrated around artificial intelligence. More than two-thirds of megaround investment this year went to companies in AI-related categories, per Crunchbase data.
The global state of megarounds
Globally, the megaround picture doesn’t look dramatically different. For 2025, around 60% of all startup funding went to financings of $100 million or more, per Crunchbase data.
That puts this year roughly on par with the 2021 market peak for funding share, as charted below.
Evolution of an asset class
So will this increasing capital concentration last? Every time we see a new trend emerge in venture funding, the question arises: Is this a cyclical blip or simply the new normal?
This time around, a solid case could be made both ways for the rise in funding share going to big rounds. On the “blip” side, it does look like the rise of Generative AI behemoths is a phenomenon very specific to this cycle.
Yet concentration of capital among a smaller collection of megarounds isn’t only a Gen AI thing. Investors are also scaling up in the age old pursuit of having the most likely companies to succeed in their portfolios. They’re willing to write bigger checks at higher valuations for the privilege of getting into a competitive deal.
Related Crunchbase query:
Related reading:
Illustration: Dom Guzman
Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the
Crunchbase Daily.
