Analysis
Value Add Pulse has tracked $257.4 billion in venture and growth-stage funding across 536 deals over the past 21 weeks, an average of $480 million per round -- a figure that says more about a handful of AI infrastructure megadeals than about the typical startup raise.
Four of the ten largest deals tracked on Pulse's funding tracker alone account for more than a third of the entire 21-week total:
- Anthropic -- $60B debt package (AI infra)
- OpenAI -- $20B round backed by Nvidia and SoftBank (AI infra)
- Blue Origin -- ~$10B raise at a $130B valuation (space)
- DeepSeek -- $7.4B round (internet/AI)
That concentration means the $480 million average is not a useful fundraising benchmark for most founders. The tracker separately counts 32 VC fund closes worth $44.0 billion -- capital raised by the firms doing the investing, not the companies receiving it -- and 69 records it is holding for review over contradictory figures, a reminder that even verified-sounding funding numbers in AI often need a second check before they're citable as fact.
Several of the ten biggest deals tracked are AI infrastructure plays -- compute, debt financing, or both -- rather than product-stage equity rounds, reinforcing that the capital flowing into AI right now increasingly looks like project finance for data centers and chips, not traditional venture investment in software companies.