$2 Billion Raised by AI Startups in the Last Week

Nearly 25% of all 2023 funding for US startups went to AI companies, amounting to $36.5B.

And well over half of all the newly formed unicorns last year were AI companies.

Almost 5 months into 2024, the growth has accelerated. In just the last week alone, AI startups reportedly raised $1.97B – breaking records like the ‘biggest seed round in history’ and minting the ‘world’s youngest self-made billionaire.’      

We at Crustdata dove into our dataset and analyzed the big AI fundraises over the last week.

We explore further details on their performance vis-a-vis other growth metrics like Total Investment Raised, YoY Headcount Growth and Founder’s Previous professional background.

Let’s dive in:

San Francisco based Scale AI raised a billion dollars at a staggering $13.8B valuation, which also helped one of its founders, Alexandr Wang, obtain the world’s youngest self-made billionaire title.

Scale AI is a data platform for AI, providing training data for leading machine learning teams.

Scale AI has raised a total of $1.6B to date. While the recent Series-F round was led by Accel, it also saw the participation of the likes of Meta, Amazon, NVIDIA and Y Combinator among others.

WitnessAI is building security and governance control solutions for enterprise AI that are safe, productive and more usable.

Started in May 2023 with just one employee (the founder himself), the company has been growing at a whopping 1000% year over year and currently has 11 employees. 

Paris based H Company, which came out of stealth and shattered records for the highest ever seed round raised in history ($220M), has 4 co-founders who previously held important positions (research director, principal scientist, founding member etc.) at DeepMind. 

Other big tech companies found on the resumes of the founders include Google, Meta, Apple and more. 

The global AI market currently stands at around $200B and is expected to touch $1.5 trillion in 2030. With the gold rush in funding activity and money being pumped into the sector by almost every major investor from around the world, there’s little to doubt the above figures.

It will be interesting to follow the performance of these 10 companies in the coming years.

About the data

The data seen above is from Crustdata - the most accurate realtime LinkedIn data source for growth and private equity investors. It indexes billions of public data points on companies every week to provide an edge over the private market.