The State of AI VC

What’s happening in AI VC? As TechCrunch just reported, 49 U.S. AI startups have raised $100 million or more in 2025, with eight companies raising multiple mega-rounds and seven crossing the billion-dollar threshold in a single fundraise. The headline story—AI is attracting unprecedented capital—is obvious. The structural story beneath it is not.

Strip away the spectacle of OpenAI’s $40 billion round and Anthropic’s $16.5 billion haul, and you find a market undergoing fundamental restructuring. Traditional venture mechanics—stage definitions, round timing, valuation step-ups, LP diversification—are being compressed, accelerated, and in some cases, rendered obsolete.

This analysis extracts six structural patterns from the 2025 data. Each has implications for how capital formation works in AI, and more importantly, for the secondary market dynamics that will inevitably follow.