For instance, Amazon pledged up to $4 billion in Anthropic, while OpenAI secured a $10 billion investment from Microsoft. Inflection AI also raised $1.3 billion in a funding round led by Microsoft. In the third quarter, VC funding inclusive of mega-deals totaled around $22.1 billion. However, after excluding these large investments, the total funding for the generative AI sector is closer to $15.1 billion.
Key takeaways:
- Despite a decline in overall venture capital investments, AI-related startups, particularly in the generative AI space, performed well in 2023, with funding surpassing $68.7 billion.
- Major generative AI vendors like OpenAI, Stability AI, and Anthropic accounted for a significant portion of the total funding.
- A large part of the funding was due to "mega-deals", which are multi-hundred-million-dollar investments from big-name backers, such as Amazon's pledge to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic and Microsoft's $10 billion investment in OpenAI.
- When subtracting the mega-deals, the total VC funding for the generative AI sector in Q3 is closer to $15.1 billion, rather than the initial $22.1 billion.