AI Soars, Asia Tanks, Seed Stalls And More

Global startup funding in 2024 was dominated by investment in artificial intelligence companies, with $100 billion of venture capital going to AI-related startups alone — an 80% increase from 2023 — Crunchbase data shows.

The AI boom was particularly concentrated in North America, which saw a 21% jump in startup funding last year, while venture investment in Asia dropped to a 10-year low.

That’s the broad takeaway from Crunchbase’s 2024 venture funding data. Other trends emerged from our reporting and data, too, including a cooler seed funding environment and hotter M&A market.

Let’s take a look, with a dozen charts that underscore the major trends in startups leading into 2025.

North America leads AI investment, Asia suffers

Artificial intelligence took the lion’s share of global startup funding in 2024, with about 1 in 3 venture dollars going to an AI-related startup.

All told, a staggering $100 billion was invested into AI-related startups globally in 2024, per Crunchbase data, with a handful of companies including Databricks, OpenAI, xAI and Anthropic alone raising tens of billions dollars.

The growth in AI investment pushed total global venture funding in 2024 to nearly $314 billion — a notch higher than the $304 billion invested in 2023. (While that’s above the pre-pandemic year of 2019, startup funding still remained below 2018 and 2020 levels.)

Last year’s funding gains were also not equally distributed.

Funding to startups in North America jumped 21% year over year to more than $184 billion, driven by those big AI deals. The AI boost was particularly obvious in Q4, with about 62% of all North American startup funding going to companies in the space, per Crunchbase data.

Conversely, investment in Asia-based startups tanked to a 10-year low in 2024, largely due to a big decline in venture funding dollars in China. The Red Dragon also hit a decade-low for funding last year, with venture investment to China-based companies falling 32% year over year to $33.2 billion.

Europe’s startup funding stabilized last year, with an estimated $51 billion invested in startups on the continent, down about 5% year over year but above pre-pandemic funding levels, including 2020.

Latin America also settled somewhat, with fintech remaining as a particularly strong sector for the region.

Familiar names among top investors

The busiest startup investors overall in 2024 were generally the top investors in AI companies.

That includes Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Y Combinator, General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners, all of which appear on both our lists of busiest startup investors in 2024 overall, and most-active investors in AI startups specifically.

Seed funding dips despite AI gains and larger deals

Seed-stage investment in the U.S. dipped in 2024, even as overall venture funding gained, underscoring a more difficult environment for the very earliest-stage startups.

Our data also shows that startups are, on average, staying longer at the seed stage and that fewer startups are progressing to Series A (or an exit) — raising their risk of failure.

That said, those startups that do raise seed rounds are generally raising bigger deals at this stage than they did in the past.

And while industries including food tech, augmented and virtual reality, and cannabis-related tech saw significant drops in seed funding last year, other sectors bucked the trend and continue to get investor interest, including robotics, AI, legal and accounting-related startups.

Unicorns surpass $1T in funding, but new creations dwindle

Private, venture-backed companies with billion-dollar valuations collectively surpassed $1 trillion in funding raised by the end of 2024, according to The Crunchbase Unicorn Board.

The milestone underscores the massive influx of funding that has gone to large and late-stage startups in recent years, including, of course, the billions invested in the AI giants.

Unicorn creation, however, has also tapered off significantly as venture funding has fallen off its peak of three years prior.

And with IPOs still few and far between, many unicorns minted during 2020 and 2021 are now stabled on the Unicorn Board with outdated valuations that will no doubt be called into question should they make a run at the public markets this year.

Startup M&A heats up

Still, while IPOs remain rare, there is one bright spot on the exit front: M&A involving venture-backed startups ticked up 7% last year, Crunchbase data shows.

The fourth quarter was particularly active, marking the most-active deal-making quarter in seven quarters.

What’s next?

As we enter 2025, we’ll be watching closely to see how these trends play out — including whether the DeepSeek scare last month puts a dent in AI investing (or only accelerates interest and investment in the space, as some predict), whether the IPO markets thaw, and whether more startups again start to flourish beyond the seed-stage.