AI raised $6.11B this week, down from $12.42B. The headline is backwards. Last week was four rounds over a billion dollars, and they were 80% of everything. This week has one. Strip the billion-dollar rounds out of both weeks and the ordinary AI market went $2.43B to $4.81B. It nearly doubled. The number of AI companies funded went from 71 to 103, and the typical round went up, $9.9M to $13.2M. Fewer giants, far more companies, bigger normal cheque.
$6.11B
AI funding this week
$1.3B
biggest AI round (Motive)
$466.1B
cumulative · 42 weeks
Verified live · grok + web
Motive, Exein, Ridgeline, Euclyd, Factory, Profound and Delos Data all confirmed their own rounds.
Say “reported” on air: Anew Labs and Cornelis Networks. Neither company has published anything.
Say carefully: Positron is “at least $500 million, and the company says $875 million.” Motive is growth financing, not a round.
Crunchbase put Delos Data ($100M) in Ontario. Its own release is datelined Palo Alto, so it moved to the US line. One row shipped with no location at all, Deepin kernel ($1.5M), resolved to China.
Analysis 1 · Overview
Of 247 funded companies this week, 103 (41.7%) were AI, taking $6.11B of the $12.59B total (48.5%). That 41.7% is the highest share of funded companies in the 42 weeks tracked. The top five took 42.7% of AI dollars against 84.8% last week, and the median AI round rose to $13.2M from $9.9M. The money at the top left. The market underneath got wider and better paid.
Analysis 2 · Regional (AI dollars only)
- United States — $4.10B (67.0%) · 57 cos. Right on the 42-week average of 66.4%. Motive and Positron are a third of it between them, and 57 funded AI companies is the highest US count in the tracker.
- China — $571.8M (9.4%) · 10 cos. Up from 2.7%. Anew Labs’ $290M is half the region, and the count only moved 8 to 10. Cheque size came back, not activity.
- Europe — $854.4M (14.0%) · 19 cos. Looks like a collapse from 30.8% and is the opposite. Last week was Mistral standing in for the continent. Without it Europe raised $339M, against $854M and 19 companies this week. Exein in Rome and Euclyd in Eindhoven lead, and both are hardware.
- Asia-Pacific (ex-China) — $150.9M (2.5%) · 7 cos. CADDi’s $114.4M in Japan is 76% of it. Japan is four of the seven.
- Middle East & Africa — $421.0M (6.9%) · 7 cos. The region’s best week in the tracker by share. Tabby’s $233M in Riyadh is 55% of it. Israel is three of the seven, led by Buildots at $130M.
- Latin America — $0 (0.0%) · 0 cos. Crunchbase logged no Latin American AI rounds at all. That is a coverage gap, not a dry week. Kapital in Mexico (~$125M), Primero ($12M) and Emilia AI ($1.5M) all announced inside the window and none are in the export.
- Rest of World — $15.0M (0.2%) · 3 cos. All Canadian: Ultimarii $9.4M in Calgary, Galaxia $3.3M in Halifax, Expertise AI $2.3M in Kitchener.
Analysis 3 · Top 5 AI rounds
1. Motive — $1.3B
Growth financing · San Francisco · General Catalyst Customer Value Fund
Motive runs the dashcams, tracking and safety software inside trucking and delivery fleets. The AI watches the road and the driver and flags what went wrong. The company confirmed more than $1.3B on September 10 and withdrew its IPO filing the same day.
⚑ Not a normal venture round — it is growth capital from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. Say “growth financing,” not “a round.”
2. Positron — $500M
Series C · Reno, NV · $5B valuation · co-led by NEA
Positron builds the chips that run AI models after they are trained. Training is the headline. Inference is the bill that arrives every day after that, and that is the market they are going after. The capital funds their next-generation silicon and a 2MW engineering data center.
⚑ Crunchbase carries $500M. Positron’s own release says $875M, raised in two tranches. Say “at least $500 million, and the company says $875 million.”
3. Anew Labs — $290M
Shanghai · ~$1.5B valuation · ByteDance spinout · reported
ByteDance’s drug-discovery unit, spun out and taking outside money for the first time, with ByteDance keeping about 56%. It pairs generative models with real lab work to design molecules. The company that owns TikTok now has a funded pharmaceutical AI business.
⚑ Reuters only, sourced to two people familiar. Neither Anew Labs nor ByteDance has said anything. Say “reported.”
4. Exein — $270M
Rome, Italy · $1.7B valuation · led by Headline
Exein puts the security inside the device itself — the firmware on a robot, a camera, a car, instead of on the network around it. Their own words for it: the security layer for physical AI. Europe’s biggest AI round this week is a hardware company, not a model company.
5. Ridgeline — $250M
Series E · Incline Village, NV · $1.425B valuation
Ridgeline rebuilds the back-office software that investment firms run on, in the cloud, with AI inside it. It is run by Dave Duffield, who founded PeopleSoft and then Workday, and he led this round with his own money.
The one to watch is number ten. Profound raised $180M (New York, Series D, $1.8B valuation, co-led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins) to tell brands whether AI answers mention them and what to change so they do. Search optimization for a web where the reader is a model. Also notable: Cornelis Networks $205M (AI networking) · Factory $200M (AI coding agents) · Ayar Labs $150M · Arcee AI $150M · Buildots $130M (construction) · CADDi $114.4M (manufacturing) · Tandem Health $100M (clinical notes).
Analysis 4 · Trends
- The money went into the plumbing, not the models. Positron $500M, Euclyd $230.7M, Cornelis $205M, Ayar Labs $150M, Delos Data $100M, Fortaegis $50M, Teram $37M. That is $1.27B into chips and the wiring between them, 21% of the week’s AI dollars. Three of them are attacking the same bottleneck: moving data between chips fast enough to keep them busy.
- Seed was 46 of 103 rounds. Nearly half the AI deals this week were seed, and one seed was $290M. Add 21 Series A and 65% of every AI round this week was at the first or second cheque.
- Physical AI got its security layer. Exein’s $270M is explicitly about securing robots and embedded devices. Around it: Shanghai Zaofu $100M, Maven Robotics $100M, KinetixAI $74.5M, ENCOS $44.7M. Robotics was 1.7% of AI dollars last week and about 7% this week.
- The dull industries are taking the vertical AI money. Buildots $130M in construction, CADDi $114.4M in manufacturing drawings, Tandem Health $100M in clinical notes, Inspiren $70M in elder care, Archy $50M in dentistry. None of them sell AI. They sell a job getting done in an industry that never had good software.
- The average is lying this week. Mean AI round $59.3M, median $13.2M. The mean is 4.5x the middle because of one growth financing. The 42-week average week is $11.1B and this week is $6.1B. The typical company still raised more than it did last week.