OpenAI and Anthropic Lead AI Funding in 2026

Industry Overview

Funding for fundamental AI startups, also known as generative AI companies or cutting-edge labs, saw a dramatic increase in the first quarter of 2026. According to Crunchbase data, this funding doubled compared to the entirety of 2025. This rapid growth underscores the rising interest in advanced artificial intelligence technologies.

This concentration of funding is increasingly dominated by a small number of large companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. In 2025 and early 2026, the market witnessed these few companies capturing a disproportionate share of global capital, thereby redefining the investment landscape in the AI sector.

General Trends

After three years of decline or stagnation in venture capital investments, 2025 marked a turning point with notable growth in overall startup funding. Crunchbase data reveals that this growth was concentrated in the largest funding rounds and the AI sector. Approximately 50% of all global venture capital funding in 2025 was allocated to companies in AI-related fields, confirming its status as the most funded sector for the third consecutive year.

Venture capital funding for AI reached $211 billion in 2025, an increase of 85% compared to $114 billion in 2024. This figure even surpasses the records set in 2021, a year already marked by unprecedented funding levels.

Key Figures

As of March 31, 2026, fundamental AI startups had raised $178 billion across 24 transactions, compared to $88.9 billion across 66 transactions in 2025. This represents a 100% increase. Furthermore, this amount is significantly higher — 466.9% more to be exact — than the $31.4 billion raised across 52 transactions in 2024.

In comparison, funding for fundamental AI companies was only $23.2 billion in 2023, a fraction of the size of OpenAI's latest round, and just $1.4 billion in 2022.

Notable Funding Rounds

Unsurprisingly, the two largest rounds in 2026 so far have been raised by competitors OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, and Anthropic, creator of Claude. Last month, OpenAI revealed it was raising an additional $10 billion for its record round of $110 billion announced in February, bringing the total fundraising for the San Francisco-based company to over $120 billion. On March 31, it was reported that the round had actually reached $122 billion. Investors in this latest funding include Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw, MGX, TPG, and T. Rowe Price.

The first tranche of this round had already marked the largest venture capital financing deal of 2026 so far and the largest of all time, according to Crunchbase data.

Also in February, the generative AI company Anthropic announced it had raised $30 billion in a massive Series G funding round led by GIC and Coatue, valuing it at $380 billion post-money. With this round, San Francisco-based Anthropic has now raised nearly $64 billion since its founding in 2021, according to Crunchbase.

The year began with Elon Musk's xAI, the generative AI startup known for its chatbot Grok and the parent company of X (formerly Twitter), securing $20 billion in Series E funding from a long list of venture capital and strategic investors. Founded in 2023, xAI has raised $42.7 billion in debt and equity funding to date, according to Crunchbase data.

Other Industry Players

Beyond the three largest giants of generative AI, a smaller group of fundamental AI startups is also raising significant amounts. Advanced Machine Intelligence, a startup co-founded by computing pioneer and former AI lead at Meta, Yann LeCun, raised $1.03 billion in March to develop "world models," or AI designed to learn and interact with the physical world. The funding for AMI, based in Paris, represents the largest initial funding round ever for a European startup and one of the largest fundings for an AI startup in the region, according to Crunchbase data. Bezos Expeditions, Cathay Innovation, Greycroft, Hiro Capital, and HV Capital led the funding, which values AMI at $3.5 billion.

Following that, the next largest funding so far is a $1 billion injection into World Labs, a San Francisco-based startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, which develops foundational models to generate and interact with the world in 3D. Investors in this round include AMD, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity, Nvidia, and Sea.

Acquisitions and IPO Outlook

The fundamental AI sector is still too young to have seen significant exits. However, OpenAI in particular has made several acquisitions. OpenAI has already completed six acquisitions in 2026, nearly as many as the entire year of 2025, according to Crunchbase data. Its latest purchase occurred on March 19, when it announced its intention to acquire Astral, a creator of open-source tools for software developers. This month, it also acquired Promptfoo, an open-source tool for testing AI applications.

Overall, the San Francisco-based company has acquired 17 companies over the past three years, according to Crunchbase data. Eight of these purchases were made in 2025, although it only began making acquisitions in April of last year.

Meanwhile, data shows that Anthropic has been much less active in terms of acquisitions. So far this year, it has made only one known purchase, that of Vercept, a two-year-old software development startup. In 2025, Anthropic made two known acquisitions: Humanloop, a platform for evaluating LLMs for enterprises, and Bun, a JavaScript execution environment for developing and managing web applications.

No fundamental AI model company is currently publicly traded, although several are actively preparing to change that by late 2026 or in 2027. The most likely candidates are the companies that have also raised the most capital: OpenAI and Anthropic.

Cohere, based in Toronto and founded by former Google researchers, is also another possibility. This startup raised $500 million last August at a valuation of $6.8 billion. Inovia Capital and Radical Ventures co-led the round, which included participation from AMD Ventures, Nvidia, PSP Investments, Salesforce Ventures, and others.

The case of xAI is interesting. In early 2026, the company effectively merged its interests with SpaceX. As a result, the highly anticipated IPO of SpaceX, scheduled for mid to late 2026, will now be the primary vehicle for public investors looking to access xAI's foundational models.