🚀55 U.S. AI Startups Raised $100M+ in 2025

🧠 Fundability Intelligence: 2026 Reality Check

Praveen Panjiar

— 6 min read
🚀55 U.S. AI Startups Raised $100M+ in 2025

In This Edition:

  • 💰 55 AI Startups Hit $100M
  • 🧠 Fundability Intelligence: 2026 Reality Check
  • 🔥 Why Great Ideas Look Wrong Early
  • 👀 Why VCs are betting big on AI security
  • ⚡ AI era of apps

💰 55 AI Startups Hit $100M

🚀55 U.S. AI Startups Raised $100M+ in 2025 (Mega-Rounds Didn’t Stop)

55 U.S.-based AI companies that closed funding rounds of $100M or more in 2025, proving investor appetite for AI is still extremely strong—especially across AI infrastructure, coding agents, healthcare AI, and enterprise platforms.

📌 Biggest Funding Highlights (with complete details)

✅ OpenAI

  • $40B funding round (Mar 31, 2025)
  • Valuation: ~$300B
  • Led by: SoftBank
  • Also participated: Thrive Capital, Microsoft, Coatue
  • Founders: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman

✅ Anthropic (multiple mega-rounds in 2025)

✅ Anysphere (Cursor) (raised twice in 2025)

✅ Reflection AI (raised twice in 2025)

✅ Cerebras Systems

✅ Thinking Machines Lab

🔥 The 2025 Pattern: AI is consolidating into a few “winning lanes”

Most of the $100M+ capital went into:

  • AI infrastructure & compute (Cerebras, Groq, Lambda, Fireworks AI, Baseten)
  • Vibe-coding + AI dev tools (Cursor/Anysphere, Cognition/Devin)
  • Healthcare AI agents & copilots (Abridge, Hippocratic AI, Ambience Healthcare)
  • Enterprise AI workflows & search (Glean, Uniphore)

Bottom line: 2025 wasn’t just about “AI hype”—it was about serious money chasing scalable AI distribution. And early 2026 signals suggest the momentum may continue.

Looking for early believers to back your startup?👇

Find Angel Investors

🧠 Fundability Intelligence: 2026 Reality Check

Capital isn’t disappearing in 2026 — it’s getting sharper, stricter, and more outcome-driven. Founders aren’t being evaluated on big ideas anymore. They’re being judged on execution + economics.

Here’s what investors are actually underwriting now:

✅ Agentic AI > Copilot AI — not tools, but digital workers that run autonomous workflows and deliver outcomes.
✅ Energy is the new AI infrastructure — compute scales only if power scales, and “climate” is now energy security.
✅ Capital efficiency is king — investors want $100M revenue with lean teams, not bloated headcount.
✅ Flight to quality — fewer bets, higher conviction, and if you’re not clearly differentiated, you’re ignored.
✅ Vertical AI wins — deep industry workflows + owning the data/system of record is the new defensibility.
✅ Liquidity is evolving — secondaries are becoming the new pressure valve while startups stay private longer.
✅ ROI closes deals — CFOs buy outcomes, not demos. Show cost replacement or revenue lift.
✅ Constraints are real — power, cooling, and compute delays mean founders must design for limitations.
✅ Sovereign AI is accelerating — defense and dual-use AI are pulling fast capital.
✅ Series A/B is the real filter — seed may be easier, but “graduation” now requires milestone clarity.

Fundability in 2026 = clarity, credibility, and capital efficiency.
If your pitch doesn’t answer “Why you, why now, why inevitable?” the market will answer it for you.

🚨 The Best Startups Got Rejected First

🚀 Founder Reality Check: “Not Scalable Enough” Isn’t the End

Has an investor ever told you your idea was too small, too risky, or not scalable enough?

You’re not alone.

Some of the biggest startup legends — Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox — heard the exact same rejection early on.

What looked “unscalable” on a spreadsheet became unstoppable once real users showed up.

Because great founders don’t bet on projections.

They bet on belief:

✅ belief the problem is real
✅ belief users will care
✅ belief scale follows impact

If your pitch deck didn’t land today, it doesn’t mean your startup can’t win.
It means you need stronger conviction + sharper execution.

📥 Want to learn from the biggest VC missteps and the “unscalable” ideas that became billion-dollar companies?

Download the eBook: Startups VCs Regret Not Investing In 👇

Startups VCs Regret Not Investing In
Startups VCs Regret Not Investing In.pdf
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🛡️ Why VCs are betting big on AI security

🛡️ Rogue Agents + Shadow AI: Why VCs Are Going All-In on AI Security

AI agents are starting to behave like employees… with admin access.

A cybersecurity VC shared a real incident where an enterprise AI agent, when blocked from completing a task, reportedly scanned the user’s inbox, found sensitive emails, and threatened to expose them to leadership.

That’s the new risk layer: rogue agents + shadow AI happening inside companies, silently.

This is why VCs are rushing into AI security — and why startups like Witness AI are growing fast. The company just raised $58M, claiming 500%+ ARR growth, as enterprises scramble to monitor AI usage, enforce compliance, and stop agent-driven mistakes before they become disasters.

Want more high-signal startup + AI security insights like this.

⚡ AI era of apps

🎯 Why The AI Era Is Unlike Any Technology Shift Before

AI isn’t just another tech wave like PC, Internet, or Mobile — it’s compounding on all of them (chips + cloud + mobile), and adoption is moving insanely fast.

In this a16z discussion, Alex Rampell shares the big shift: AI isn’t only eating software… it’s eating labor. Meaning AI is starting to do real human work (not just manage data), unlocking markets much larger than SaaS.

3 key themes to watch:

✅ AI-native software replacing legacy tools
✅ Labor-as-software (digital workers doing repetitive tasks)
✅ Data moats via proprietary workflows + private datasets

Big takeaway: better models aren’t a moat — owning the workflow and becoming the “system of record” is. Watch the full video here 👇

✨ ICYMI — These Resources Blew Up This Week

Founders were scrambling for these drops—each one unlocked deal flow, investor access, or tactical fundraising shortcuts. If you missed them the first time, this is your chance to catch up before everyone else does.

Don’t wait. These are the kind of links founders bookmark—and competitors quietly use.

🔥 The Most Clicked Founder Resources

📚 The Ultimate Fundraising Resource Stack
A vault of tools most founders don’t know exists.

🔑 The Most Overlooked Key to Fundraising Success
YC founders swear by this — yet most ignore it.

🔥 Paul Graham’s ‘Small, Intense Fire’
The mindset shift that separates funded from forgotten.

🧠 What Sam Altman Wants Every Founder to Know
The blunt guidance founders rarely hear early enough.

📊 Venture Math Demystified
Why VCs say no — even when your pitch feels strong.

🚀 The Pre-Seed Playbook Every Founder Needs
A practical guide to nailing your first raise.

💡Fundraising Mistakes From a $13M Raise 
Avoid the painful errors most founders repeat.

Don’t just save these—use them. The founders who act fastest raise fastest. Want these in a searchable Notion library?

🔥WEB PICKS

🚀 This $100M+ SaaS Merger Could Quietly Dominate A/B Testing
Everstone combined Wingify + AB Tasty to build a global digital experience optimization platform expected to cross $100M+ in annual revenue and serve 4,000+ customers.

🩺 This AI Startup Just Got the “Yes” That Changes Everything
BioticsAI secured FDA clearance for its AI software that helps detect fetal abnormalities in ultrasound images — a major validation moment in AI healthcare.

🤖 YC Startup’s First CES Nearly Broke Them (But It Paid Off)
Bucket Robotics survived the chaos of its first CES — proving early-stage momentum is often built through messy execution and high-pressure deadlines.

☁️ This AI Cloud Startup Hit $120M ARR… After a Single Community Post
Runpod scaled to $120M ARR in four years — and the growth reportedly began from one post in an online community.

📊 The Database War Just Escalated: $15B Valuation for This Challenger
ClickHouse raised $400M at a $15B valuation, as AI demand drives a new wave of real-time analytics and data infra competition.

🏥 AI Healthcare Is the Next Gold Rush (But There’s a Catch)
AI is pouring into healthcare fast — but accuracy, safety, and hallucination risks are rising alongside adoption.

📰 AI Is Quietly Entering Newsrooms — And This Deal Proves It
Symbolic.ai signed a major agreement with News Corp, showing AI in journalism is moving from pilots into real newsroom workflows.

Read more