Crypto enterprise funding within the U.S. clocked in at roughly $861 million for the primary three months of 2025, however was dwarfed by synthetic intelligence’s practically $20 billion haul, based on knowledge supplied by Pitchbook, displaying how traders proceed to pivot in direction of AI.
Information exhibits that traders closed 795 offers in the usin AI from January to March, with blockbuster offers like Databricks’ $15.3 billion spherical and Anthropic’s $2 billion elevate dominating headlines.
Crypto’s largest blockbuster deal, compared, was Abu Dhabi’s MGX, with a $2 billion funding into Binance – the primary institutional placement within the crypto alternate. Different offers of word embrace a $82 million elevate from cost infrastructure firm Mesh, ETF issuer Bitwise’s $70 million spherical, and digital asset financial institution Sygnum’s $58 million providing.
Prior reporting by Pitchbook exhibits that AI startups attracted one-third of worldwide VC funding in 2024, totaling $131.5 billion, with practically 1 / 4 of recent startups being an AI firm throughout 4,318 VC offers, in comparison with crypto’s $4.9 billion throughout simply 706 offers.
Evaluation: Has AI stolen crypto’s enterprise {dollars}?
Blockbuster rounds from VCs within the AI house and headline-grabbing antics, akin to OpenAI’s Sam Altman looking for trillions, and AI’s rise from technological novelty to family title due to transformer fashions, would make one suppose that there is instantly an investor desire for one over the opposite.
Traditionally, all knowledge exhibits that VCs have usually favored AI over crypto, with AI and machine studying attracting constant funding that is expanded exponentially, based on Statista knowledge, rising from $670 million in 2011 to $36 billion in 2020.
There’s solely been one yr the place crypto beat AI for funding, and that comes with a caveat: narrower AI categorizations, like ABI Analysis‘s $22.3 billion AI estimate in 2021, counsel crypto briefly outpaced AI funding throughout the bullish crypto cycle earlier than AI funding surged once more to over $100 billion by 2024.
Needless to say all of this ignores crypto-native quirks like airdrops, which put contemporary capital within the arms of customers and, in flip, pump the token value, inflating the scale of tasks’ treasuries.
A current report from Dragonfly discovered that between 2020 and 2024, the 11 largest airdrops generated $7 billion. This would possibly not shut the hole between AI and crypto, but it surely exhibits that there are extra methods to get a greenback than conventional enterprise capital.
