Friday Q&A - a venture winter is here. But is AI startup investment still booming?
...Oh yea. Let's break it down.
All data below comes from U.S. startups using the Carta cap table platform. We looked at Seed and Series A data since Oct 1, 2022. Over 1,400 individual rounds included.
Investment
Total investment into Seed AI companies rose 2.5% from Q4 2022 to Q1 2023 - not a ton BUT...
Investment into Seed non-AI companies (Other in the chart) fell 34% 🤐
Series A? Investment into AI rose over 50% while the rest of the market fell 54% from Q4 to Q1.
This is the hottest space in startups, hands down.
Valuations / Rounds Sizes
Seed stage: AI company rounds grew 10% from Q4 to Q1. Valuations grew 19%, same timeframe. Both round size and valuation are substantially above non-AI companies.
Series A: AI companies get over double the median cash raised in non-AI rounds.
- AI company Series A? $52 million pre-money valuation. Everything else: $37.5 million.
Now, you may reasonably be asking, "what constitutes an AI company"? Our team made a judgement call on each company (yes, manually, of course we asked ChatGPT first). Some of these are building their own LLMs, some are layers on top of existing major models, some are utilizing AI/ML in completely novel applications.
Subscribe to our weekly data newsletter for more detail on AI valuations by industry, location, etc all coming soon!
#cartadata #AI #startups #valuations #venturecapital
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