Here are the 49 US AI startups that have raised $100M or more in 2025 (techcrunch.com)

U.S. AI funding stayed torrid in 2025: TechCrunch’s tally shows 49 startups have already raised rounds of $100 million or more — matching 2024’s pace — with a notable rise in companies taking multiple “mega-rounds” this year. The tally spans giant rounds (OpenAI’s record $40 billion; Anthropic’s $13 billion) and numerous billion-dollar-plus valuations (Cognition AI $10.2B, Sierra >$10B, Anysphere, Groq, Cerebras). Investors include strategic players like Nvidia, SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins and institutional funds, underscoring broad appetite across VCs, hyperscalers and chipmakers. Technically, the money is concentrated in a few clear buckets: research labs and model builders (Thinking Machines, Decart, Lila Sciences), AI infrastructure and accelerators (Cerebras $1.1B, Groq $750M, Celestial, Nexthop, TensorWave, Baseten), domain agents and vertical AI (Hippocratic AI, Harvey, EliseAI, EvenUp), and tooling/ops like data labeling, benchmarking, and enterprise search (Snorkel, LMArena, Glean). That mix signals two implications for the community: sustained funding will accelerate large-model development and domain-specialized agents, while driving surging demand for custom compute, inference chips, and production-grade ML tooling — and it will heighten regulatory and competitive dynamics as valuations and capabilities grow.