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, in response to information offered by Pitchbook, exhibiting how traders proceed to indicate desire to AI.
Knowledge reveals 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 be aware embody 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 reveals that AI startups attracted one-third of world VC funding in 2024, totaling $131.5 billion, with practically 1 / 4 of latest 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, reminiscent of OpenAI’s Sam Altman looking for trillions, and AI’s rise from technological novelty to family identify because of transformer fashions, would make one assume that there is immediately an investor desire for one over the opposite.
Traditionally, all information reveals that VCs have usually favored AI over crypto, with AI and machine studying attracting constant funding that is expanded exponentially, in response to Statista information, rising from $670 million in 2011 to $36 billion in 2020 and solely upwards from there.
There’s solely been one 12 months the place crypto beat AI for funding, which was 2021 when VCs poured $30 billion into the market in comparison with ABI Analysis’s $22.3 billion AI estimate for the 12 months.
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 dimensions of initiatives’ treasuries.
A latest report from Dragonfly discovered that between 2020 and 2024, the 11 largest airdrops generated $7 billion. This may not shut the hole between AI and crypto, nevertheless it reveals that there are extra methods to get a greenback than conventional enterprise capital.
