Markets, AI, Venture Capital, Fundraise Despite the crypto ‘Trump bump’ on the finish of 2024, deal circulation nonetheless favors Artificial Intelligence. But is there a brand new choice for AI over crypto?
Crypto enterprise funding within the U.S. clocked in at roughly $861 million for the primary three months of 2025, however was dwarfed by synthetic intelligence’s practically $20 billion haul, in accordance with information supplied by Pitchbook, exhibiting how buyers proceed to pivot in direction of AI.
Data reveals that buyers closed 795 offers in the united statesin AI from January to March, with blockbuster offers like Databricks’ $15.3 billion round and Anthropic’s $2 billion raise dominating headlines.
Crypto’s largest blockbuster deal, as compared, was Abu Dhabi’s MGX, with a $2 billion investment into Binance – the primary institutional placement within the crypto alternate. Other offers of notice embrace a $82 million increase from cost infrastructure firm Mesh, ETF issuer Bitwise’s $70 million spherical, and digital asset financial institution Sygnum’s $58 million providing.
Prior reporting by Pitchbook reveals that AI startups attracted one-third of worldwide VC funding in 2024, totaling $131.5 billion, with practically 1 / 4 of recent startups being an AI firm throughout 4,318 VC offers, in comparison with crypto’s $4.9 billion throughout simply 706 offers.
Analysis: Has AI stolen crypto’s enterprise {dollars}?
Blockbuster rounds from VCs within the AI area and headline-grabbing antics, such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman seeking trillions, and AI’s rise from technological novelty to family title thanks to transformer models, would make one assume that there is all of the sudden an investor choice for one over the opposite.
Historically, all information reveals that VCs have usually favored AI over crypto, with AI and machine studying attracting constant funding that is expanded exponentially, in accordance with Statista data, rising from $670 million in 2011 to $36 billion in 2020.
There’s solely been one 12 months the place crypto beat AI for funding, and that comes with a caveat: narrower AI categorizations, like ABI Research‘s $22.3 billion AI estimate in 2021, counsel crypto briefly outpaced AI funding through the bullish crypto cycle earlier than AI funding surged once more to over $100 billion by 2024.
Keep in thoughts that every one of this ignores crypto-native quirks like airdrops, which put contemporary capital within the arms of customers and, in flip, pump the token worth, inflating the dimensions of initiatives’ treasuries.
A recent report from Dragonfly discovered that between 2020 and 2024, the 11 largest airdrops generated $7 billion. This will not shut the hole between AI and crypto, but it surely reveals that there are extra methods to get a greenback than conventional enterprise capital.
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