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Practical AI · Episode 46 · Funding segment (closes the show)
AI Funding — Week of June 12–18, 2026
Crunchbase number of record · DeepSeek headline grok-verified · AI-only regional pie
$11.64B
AI funding this week — 65.2% of every venture dollar in the world.
$17.84B
Total funding, all sectors
89
AI companies funded (of 217)
76%
of AI dollars went to China
The turn: 64% of all AI funding is ONE company — DeepSeek's $7.4B. Strip it out and the real AI market was $4.24B, down from $7.78B last week. One Chinese mega-round made a cooling market look like a boom.
Where the AI money went
China$8.890B · 10 cos · 76.4%
United States$1.341B · 33 cos · 11.5%
Asia-Pacific (ex-China)$0.663B · 10 cos · 5.7%
Europe$0.545B · 25 cos · 4.7%
Middle East & Africa$0.130B · 3 cos · 1.1%
Latin America$0.038B · 2 cos · 0.3%
Rest of World$0.029B · 6 cos · 0.2%
Top 5 AI rounds
DeepSeek$7.4B
Series A · China · ⭐ the show story
Open-source LLM lab — China's answer to OpenAI. Its first-ever outside round; reported valuation north of $50B, now China's most valuable AI startup.
Shihang Intelligent$1.0B
Series A · China
Water robots and intelligent unmanned marine equipment. Physical AI / robotics.
Odyssey$310M
Series B · United States
General-purpose AI "world models" — causal, multimodal simulations of how the real world behaves.
SiliconFlow$296M
Series B · Singapore
Cloud platform for deploying and running large language and multimodal models. AI infrastructure.
Sarvam AI$234M
Series B · India
India's sovereign-AI play — models and infrastructure built for Indian languages and enterprise.
What it means
- One round defined the week. DeepSeek = 64% of AI dollars. Read past the headline.
- Money pooled in China; deals spread in the US. China 76% on 10 deals; US 11.5% on 33 deals.
- Early stage is busy. 34 Seed + 23 Series A rounds.
- Physical AI keeps showing up. 7 robotics rounds, mostly marine/industrial — not humanoid hype.
- The funding mirrors the news. US restricted its frontier (Fable 5 ban); China funded theirs at record size.
The close (read on air)
Hook: "AI took 65% of every venture dollar in the world this week. $11.6 billion."
Turn: "But almost two-thirds is one company — DeepSeek raised $7.4 billion in China. Strip it out and the real market actually shrank from last week."
Closer: "Our government turned off America's best AI model on Friday. The same week, China funded its best one at the largest round we've ever tracked. The map of who controls AI is being redrawn in real time — and the money is voting."