Bot Memo tracks 148 AI startup funding rounds across the Gulf between January 2023 and December 2025, worth $2.56B. Six countries are in scope: the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain. Israel, Egypt and Turkey sit outside that definition and are counted separately, so nothing below folds them in.
The UAE leads on volume with 103 deals and $1.75B. Saudi Arabia has 39 deals and $797M, and it is closing on pace rather than on size: 6 deals in 2023, 26 in 2025.
Both countries are converting energy revenue into compute and equity at the same time, through different machinery. The UAE spreads capital across free zones and a wide bench of private funds. Saudi Arabia routes it through a small number of state vehicles.
For geographic context, see how the Africa AI market and the Southeast Asia AI market compare on deal volume and sovereign involvement.
On this page
- Middle East AI Funding: $2.56B Across 148 Gulf Deals (2023-2025)
- UAE vs Saudi Arabia: Two Models for AI Dominance
- Top AI Startups in the Middle East by Funding
- The Foundation Model Race: Falcon vs ALLaM
- Who Funds Middle East AI: Sovereign Wealth and Regional Venture Capital
- Data Centers and Compute: The Infrastructure Arms Race
- Where Gulf AI Startups Concentrate by Vertical
- FAQ: Middle East AI Startups
- Methodology
Middle East AI Funding: $2.56B Across 148 Gulf Deals (2023-2025)
Between January 2023 and December 2025, Bot Memo recorded 148 disclosed AI startup funding rounds across the six Gulf states, worth $2.56B.
One large cheque sits outside that total on purpose. Microsoft’s $1.5B investment in G42 in April 2024 is corporate strategic capital rather than a venture round, so it is excluded from every funding figure and every table on this page. It gets its own treatment in the infrastructure section below.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia together went from 21 deals in 2023 to 75 in 2025, a 3.6x rise. The UAE moved from 15 to 49 (3.3x) and Saudi Arabia from 6 to 26 (4.3x). Counting Qatar, Kuwait and Oman as well, the Gulf-wide 2025 figure is 80 deals.
Round sizes stay small. Seed rounds carry a $3.75M median and Series A a $12.50M median. The most common bracket is $1M to $5M with 44 rounds, and 99 of the 128 rounds with a disclosed amount came in under $25M. Six cleared $100M.
FinTech leads the verticals with 45 deals, then Media & Entertainment at 17 and Retail & E-Commerce at 15. The single largest entry in the Gulf set is Alpheya, an Abu Dhabi wealth management technology platform launched in November 2023 by Lunate and BNY, then still trading as BNY Mellon, with a $300M capital commitment behind it.
AI classification skews applied rather than foundational: 51 companies are AI Native, 47 AI Augmented and 44 AI Application. One qualifies as AI Platforms. Frontier model work in the region happens inside sovereign labs, at the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi and at HUMAIN in Riyadh, not inside venture-backed startups.
Regional Deal Flow (2023-2025)
| Year | UAE Deals | UAE Funding | Saudi Deals | Saudi Funding | Combined |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 15 | $494.7M | 6 | $258.4M | $753.1M |
| 2024 | 39 | $473.4M | 7 | $123.3M | $596.7M |
| 2025 | 49 | $782.9M | 26 | $415.1M | $1,198.0M |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 148 Gulf AI deals, 2023 to 2025. Excludes the Microsoft investment in G42.
The 2024 dip in dollars is a mix shift rather than a slowdown. Deal count across the two countries more than doubled, from 21 to 46, while the 2023 mega-rounds were not repeated at the same size. Tamara‘s $150M debt facility from Goldman Sachs and Alpheya’s $300M launch both landed in 2023. By 2025 both count and cheque size had recovered.
UAE vs Saudi Arabia: Two Models for AI Dominance
The two countries run different playbooks.
The UAE works as a hub. It pulls founders into free zones such as DIFC and Abu Dhabi Global Market, houses them at Hub71, and spreads capital across a wide bench of sovereign and private funds. Hub71 now counts 410+ startups, which have raised roughly $2.7B between them since it opened in 2019. In 2024 alone its portfolio companies raised a record $2.17B, up 44.7% year on year. Dubai’s D33 agenda targets 30 unicorns by 2033, and Dubai Founders HQ, launched at One Central in October 2025, is the delivery vehicle for it.
Saudi Arabia runs the state-directed version. Saudi Vision 2030 sets the frame. The Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA) sets strategy, PIF deploys capital, and HUMAIN builds and hosts models. Project Transcendence bundles data centers, startup investment and talent development into a single $100B national programme.
| Dimension | UAE | Saudi Arabia |
|---|---|---|
| Total deals (2023-2025) | 103 | 39 |
| Total funding | $1.75B | $797M |
| Deal growth (2023 to 2025) | 3.3x (15 to 49) | 4.3x (6 to 26) |
| Strategy model | Hub, attract global founders | State-directed, Vision 2030 |
| Foundation model | Falcon (TII, open weights) | ALLaM (SDAIA, then HUMAIN) |
| Lead sovereign investor | Mubadala | PIF |
| AI infrastructure programme | MGX, $100B target with BlackRock | Project Transcendence, $100B |
| Main startup hub | Hub71 and DIFC | Riyadh |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 148 Gulf AI deals, 2023 to 2025.
The two models produce different shapes. The UAE generates more rounds and pulls in more foreign venture capital: Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital India, Peak XV Partners, Balderton Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners all appear in the Gulf set. Saudi Arabia does fewer rounds but larger ones, and more of its capital stays domestic through local deployment mandates.
Talent supply is the third leg of the UAE model. Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) opened in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi in 2019 as the first graduate research university built entirely around AI, with departments in machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing. It now feeds researchers into TII and into local startups.
Set against global AI funding statistics, the Gulf’s $2.56B is small next to US AI investment. The rate of change is the part worth watching.
Top AI Startups in the Middle East by Funding
The 15 largest rounds in the Gulf set are concentrated in financial services and in three cities.
| Rank | Company | Funding | Stage | City | Vertical | Lead Investor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alpheya | $300M | Equity | Abu Dhabi | FinTech | Lunate |
| 2 | Premialab | $220M | Growth | Dubai | FinTech | KKR |
| 3 | Hala | $157M | Series B | Riyadh | FinTech | The Rise Fund (TPG), Sanabil |
| 4 | Tamara | $150M | Debt | Riyadh | FinTech | Goldman Sachs |
| 5 | Moove | $100M | Series B | Dubai | Transportation, FinTech | Uber |
| 6 | Allo | $100M | Debt | Dubai | FinTech | Greengage |
| 7 | Gathern | $72M | Series B | Riyadh | Real Estate | Sanabil |
| 8 | Flow48 | $69M | Series A | Dubai | FinTech | Breega |
| 9 | Huspy | $59M | Series B | Dubai | Real Estate, FinTech | Balderton Capital |
| 10 | Tabby | $58M | Series C | Dubai | FinTech | Sequoia Capital India |
| 11 | AppliedAI | $55M | Series A | Abu Dhabi | Enterprise Software | G42 |
| 12 | CredibleX | $55M | Seed | Abu Dhabi | FinTech | Further Ventures |
| 13 | PetroApp | $50M | Undisclosed | Riyadh | Transportation | Jadwa Investment |
| 14 | Freedx | $50M | Undisclosed | Dubai | FinTech | Undisclosed |
| 15 | Andalusia Labs | $48M | Series A | Abu Dhabi | FinTech | Lightspeed Venture Partners |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 148 Gulf AI deals, 2023 to 2025. Tabby was headquartered in Dubai at the January 2023 round and moved to Riyadh later that year. Premialab was founded in Hong Kong in 2016 and now runs from London, Dubai and Hong Kong.
Twelve of these 15 companies carry a FinTech vertical. Gulf banks and payment networks are large, profitable and under regulatory pressure to modernise, which hands an AI startup a paying customer in year one instead of year four. Alaan, a Dubai spend management platform, raised its own $48M Series A led by Peak XV Partners in August 2025 and sits level with Andalusia Labs at the bottom of this table.
Abu Dhabi holds four of the 15 despite being the smaller startup city, on the strength of Hub71 and G42’s investment arm. AppliedAI, backed by G42 with a $55M Series A, builds applied AI systems for regulated enterprises out of Abu Dhabi and now sells under the Opus brand. It is the clearest example of sovereign capital paired with commercial deployment.
The non-FinTech entries are worth naming. Xpanceo raised $40M in seed funding for smart contact lens research in Dubai, and Boston Oncology Arabia secured $35M from TVM Capital Healthcare for oncology biosimilar manufacturing in Riyadh.
For city-level comparisons across global hubs, see our analysis of AI startup funding by city.
The Foundation Model Race: Falcon vs ALLaM
MENA is one of the few regions outside the US and China where state entities fund indigenous large language model development. Two programmes define it.
Falcon (UAE)
Abu Dhabi’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII), part of the Advanced Technology Research Council, has shipped a new Falcon generation roughly every year. Falcon 3 arrived in December 2024 with a family topping out at 10B parameters, trained on 14 trillion tokens, and its 10B model led Hugging Face’s open leaderboard among models under 13B. The current flagship is Falcon-H1-34B, part of a hybrid architecture family released in 2025 that TII rates against models up to twice its size, followed in 2026 by a reasoning variant and a small multimodal model. The largest Falcon TII has ever released by raw parameter count is still Falcon 180B from 2023, which belongs to an older dense-transformer generation and should not be read as the current ceiling.
Falcon’s play is open weights and global reach. Models are published on Hugging Face under the TII Falcon License, a permissive Apache 2.0 derivative with an acceptable use policy attached. TII positions Falcon as a general open alternative to Llama rather than as an Arabic specialist.
ALLaM (Saudi Arabia)
ALLaM came out of the National Center for AI (NCAI) at SDAIA, whose Center of Excellence for Generative AI opened in May 2023 and went on to publish 7B and 13B checkpoints. The 7B model is openly available on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0. The 13B ships through Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and IBM watsonx under a royalty-free SDAIA licence rather than as open weights.
HUMAIN, the PIF-owned AI company launched in May 2025, took over the ALLaM brand and built ALLaM 34B as a new generation trained from scratch, then launched it in August 2025 as the engine behind HUMAIN Chat. The 34B model is closed, with no published weights or public API, and runs on HUMAIN’s own infrastructure inside Saudi Arabia under Saudi data protection law. That hosting arrangement is as much the point of the exercise as the benchmarks are.
| Feature | Falcon (UAE, TII) | ALLaM (Saudi Arabia, SDAIA and HUMAIN) |
|---|---|---|
| Current flagship | Falcon-H1-34B, 2025 | ALLaM 34B, 2025 |
| Largest ever released | Falcon 180B, 2023 generation | ALLaM 34B |
| Training scale cited | 14 trillion tokens for Falcon 3 | Large Arabic and English corpus |
| Language focus | Multilingual, English-primary | Arabic-first, bilingual |
| Weights | Published on Hugging Face under the TII Falcon License | 34B closed; 7B open under Apache 2.0 |
| Strategy | Global open distribution | Sovereign hosting, Arabic alignment |
| Built by | TII research center | NCAI at SDAIA, then HUMAIN |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of public announcements from TII, SDAIA and HUMAIN.
For a founder in the region the choice is practical. Falcon gives permissive weights to fine-tune and self-host anywhere. ALLaM gives stronger Arabic handling and in-kingdom data residency, which is what matters when the buyer is a Saudi bank or a ministry.
Who Funds Middle East AI: Sovereign Wealth and Regional Venture Capital
Across the 148 Gulf deals, sovereign wealth sets the ceiling on infrastructure while regional venture capital does the volume at seed and Series A.
Wa’ed Ventures, the venture arm of Saudi Aramco, is the most active investor in the set, participating in 11 rounds at seed and Series A with a bias toward industrial automation and energy transition. Shorooq Partners and Plus VC follow at 9 rounds each.
Most Active Middle East AI Investors (2023-2025)
| Investor | Deals | Type | HQ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wa’ed Ventures | 11 | Corporate VC (Aramco) | Saudi Arabia |
| Shorooq Partners | 9 | Regional VC | UAE |
| Plus VC | 9 | Regional VC | Bahrain |
| Endeavor Catalyst | 7 | Global VC | US |
| COTU Ventures | 6 | Regional VC | UAE |
| Oraseya Capital | 6 | Regional VC | UAE |
| Wamda Capital | 5 | Regional VC | UAE |
| Y Combinator | 5 | Accelerator | US |
| Dubai Future District Fund | 5 | Sovereign | UAE |
| Global Ventures | 4 | Regional VC | UAE |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 148 Gulf AI deals, 2023 to 2025. Counts are deal participations, lead or otherwise, with investor name variants consolidated.
Three layers stack up in that table.
Sovereign capital sets the ceiling. Mubadala backs Hub71 and holds an anchor stake in G42. PIF put 211 billion Saudi riyals (about $56.2B) into gigaproject investments in 2024, down 12.4% year on year and down from 8% to 6% of its total assets after an $8B writedown on construction megaprojects, while its total assets under management grew to roughly $913B. MGX, launched by Mubadala and G42 in 2024, partnered with BlackRock, Microsoft and Global Infrastructure Partners on a $100B global AI infrastructure target. Dubai Future District Fund goes straight into startup rounds and appears in 5.
Regional venture capital does the volume. Shorooq Partners, Wamda Capital, Plus VC and COTU Ventures between them touched 27 of the 148 rounds, close to one in five. These are the firms filling the seed to Series B gap that a sovereign fund is too large to serve efficiently. On the Riyadh side, STV, Impact46 and RZM Investment show up repeatedly.
International venture capital sets the price. Y Combinator appears in 5 rounds, and KKR, Sequoia Capital India, Peak XV Partners, Balderton Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners each led one of the region’s largest. Their participation tells a Gulf founder whether a round is priced against local comparables or global ones.
For a broader view of cross-border investment patterns, see our analysis of the most active AI investors globally.
Data Centers and Compute: The Infrastructure Arms Race
Gulf AI ambition rests on physical capacity funded at sovereign scale. Both countries are spending at levels that compare to US hyperscaler buildouts. UAE Minister of State for AI Omar Al Olama put the UAE’s own figure at more than 500 billion dirhams, roughly $136B, deployed into AI since 2014.
UAE Infrastructure
Two programmes anchor the UAE side.
MGX and BlackRock: Abu Dhabi’s MGX fund, launched by Mubadala and G42, joined BlackRock, Microsoft and Global Infrastructure Partners in September 2024 to mobilise up to $100B for AI data centers and the power infrastructure behind them. The initial target is $30B in private equity capital.
Stargate UAE: a 1GW AI data center campus in Abu Dhabi, expandable to 5GW, built by G42’s Khazna Data Centres with OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and SoftBank. The first 200MW phase is targeted for the third quarter of 2026. Microsoft’s $1.5B strategic investment in G42, announced in April 2024, sits behind that anchor role and put Microsoft vice chair Brad Smith on the G42 board. That $1.5B is strategic corporate money and is deliberately kept out of the venture totals on this page.
Saudi Infrastructure
Saudi compute sits under the Vision 2030 digital transformation mandate.
NEOM and DataVolt: a $5B net-zero AI factory at NEOM’s Oxagon industrial zone, using advanced cooling technologies and renewable power, with phase one expected operational in 2028. The site sits on submarine cable routes linking Europe, Asia and Africa.
AWS Saudi Region: Amazon committed $5.3B to a three-availability-zone cloud region in Saudi Arabia, launched in 2026. It gives HUMAIN local capacity for ALLaM and gives Saudi buyers in-kingdom data residency.
Project Transcendence: the $100B umbrella programme covering data centers, startup funding and AI talent. It was announced eight months after the UAE’s own $100B commitment through MGX, which is a fair summary of how the two states set targets.
For founders, this buildout shows up as low-latency compute, data residency compliance and sovereign cloud options that were not available two years ago.
Where Gulf AI Startups Concentrate by Vertical
FinTech dominance is the headline, but the rest of the distribution says more about what the region buys.
| Vertical | Deals | Share |
|---|---|---|
| FinTech | 45 | 30.4% |
| Media & Entertainment | 17 | 11.5% |
| Retail & E-Commerce | 15 | 10.1% |
| Marketing & Sales Tech | 12 | 8.1% |
| Health & Biotech | 10 | 6.8% |
| Real Estate & Construction | 9 | 6.1% |
| Enterprise Software | 8 | 5.4% |
| HR Tech & People Analytics | 7 | 4.7% |
Share is measured against all 148 deals. Companies working across more than one vertical count in each, so the column sums above 100%. Below the table, Developer Tools & AI Infrastructure, Transportation & Mobility and Food & AgriTech tie at 6 deals each. Source: Bot Memo analysis of Gulf AI deals, 2023 to 2025.
Media & Entertainment at 17 deals is the second largest segment and the clearest arbitrage in the region. Arabic-language content tools serve roughly 422 million Arabic speakers with a fraction of the generative AI quality that English speakers get by default, so a Gulf team building Arabic dubbing, captioning or content generation faces weaker competition than the same team building in English. Retail & E-Commerce at 15 and Marketing & Sales Tech at 12 follow the same logic: large regional buyers, weak local-language tooling.
Health & Biotech accounts for 10 deals, including Boston Oncology Arabia’s $35M for biosimilar manufacturing and Xpanceo‘s $40M seed round. The segment grew from 2 deals in 2023 to 5 in 2025 as Saudi healthcare procurement opened up under Vision 2030.
Enterprise Software sits at 8 deals, lower than a first read of the raw data suggests. Most Gulf AI companies selling into enterprises also carry a specific industry vertical, and that specific vertical is the one describing what they sell. Counting them under a horizontal label would move 20 points of share away from the segments doing the real work.
Compare these patterns with other emerging markets in our LATAM AI startup analysis covering Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.
FAQ: Middle East AI Startups
Which Middle East country is leading in AI?
The UAE leads on deal volume, with 103 deals and $1.75B against Saudi Arabia’s 39 deals and $797M across 2023 to 2025. Saudi Arabia is growing faster off a smaller base, at 4.3x deal growth versus the UAE’s 3.3x. On government AI strategy specifically, Saudi Arabia ranks first globally in the Tortoise Global AI Index government strategy pillar, while the UAE scores higher on projected AI contribution to GDP, forecast at around 14% by 2030.
How much has the UAE invested in artificial intelligence?
UAE-headquartered AI startups raised $1.75B across 103 disclosed rounds between 2023 and 2025. That figure covers venture and growth funding only. At the infrastructure level the numbers are far larger: UAE Minister of State for AI Omar Al Olama has put total AI deployment at more than 500 billion dirhams, about $136B, since 2014, and MGX carries a $100B global target with BlackRock alongside Microsoft’s $1.5B strategic investment in G42.
What is Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 AI strategy?
Saudi Vision 2030 places AI at the centre of economic diversification away from oil. SDAIA coordinates the National Strategy for Data & AI, which targets an AI contribution of $135.2B to Saudi GDP by 2030. The execution vehicles are HUMAIN for foundation models and sovereign hosting, Project Transcendence for the $100B infrastructure and talent programme, and PIF for direct investment.
What is G42 and who owns it?
G42 is an Abu Dhabi AI and cloud computing company. Its controlling shareholder is Royal Group, whose ultimate beneficial owner is Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who also chairs G42. Mubadala holds an anchor stake dating from the 2020 transaction in which G42 acquired Injazat and Khazna, a large position but not a controlling one. Microsoft invested $1.5B for a minority stake in April 2024 and Brad Smith joined the board. G42 co-founded MGX with Mubadala and anchors several regional AI infrastructure projects.
What is Hub71 in Abu Dhabi?
Hub71 is Abu Dhabi’s global tech hub for startups, set up and funded by Mubadala. It counts 410+ startups, which have raised roughly $2.7B between them since it opened in 2019. It runs four specialist tracks: Hub71+ AI, Hub71+ Digital Assets, Hub71+ ClimateTech and Hub71+ Life Sciences. In 2024 its portfolio companies raised a record $2.17B, up 44.7% year on year.
What is the Falcon LLM from Abu Dhabi?
Falcon is a family of open-weight large language models from the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) under Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council. Falcon 3, released in December 2024, tops out at 10B parameters, was trained on 14 trillion tokens, and led Hugging Face’s open leaderboard for models under 13B. The current flagship is Falcon-H1-34B from 2025, while 2023’s Falcon 180B remains the largest Falcon released by parameter count. Weights are published under the TII Falcon License, a permissive Apache 2.0 derivative with an acceptable use policy.
What is ALLaM and who built it?
ALLaM is a bilingual Arabic and English large language model that originated at the National Center for AI (NCAI) inside SDAIA, which published 7B and 13B checkpoints from 2023 onward. The 7B model is openly available on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0; the 13B ships through Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and IBM watsonx under an SDAIA licence. HUMAIN, the PIF-owned AI company, took over the brand in 2025 and built ALLaM 34B as a new generation trained from scratch, launching it in August 2025 as the engine behind HUMAIN Chat. The 34B model is closed and runs on sovereign Saudi infrastructure.
What is SDAIA and what does it do?
The Saudi Data & Artificial Intelligence Authority (SDAIA) is Saudi Arabia’s national authority for data and AI, established in 2019. It coordinates the National Strategy for Data & AI, which targets $135.2B of AI contribution to Saudi GDP by 2030. SDAIA oversees the National Data Management Office and the National Center for AI, where ALLaM was originally developed.
What is MGX and how much is it investing?
MGX is an Abu Dhabi AI investment vehicle co-founded by Mubadala and G42 in 2024. It partnered with BlackRock, Microsoft and Global Infrastructure Partners to mobilise up to $100B for AI data centers and power infrastructure globally, with an initial $30B private equity target. MGX is how UAE sovereign wealth buys into global compute capacity rather than only domestic capacity.
How does Qatar’s AI strategy compare to UAE and Saudi Arabia?
Qatar operates at a much smaller scale in startup funding. The Gulf dataset holds two Qatar-headquartered AI rounds against the UAE’s 103 and Saudi Arabia’s 39. Qatar concentrates its AI investment through the Qatar Investment Authority and Qatar Foundation, with an emphasis on education, research and sports technology rather than a broad startup programme.
What is the difference between UAE and Saudi AI strategy?
The UAE runs a hub model: free zones such as DIFC and Abu Dhabi Global Market to attract founders, open-weight models through Falcon, and partnerships with Microsoft and BlackRock. Saudi Arabia runs a state-directed model: AI centralised under SDAIA, sovereign models built and hosted by HUMAIN, and capital channelled through PIF and Project Transcendence. The UAE optimises for breadth, Saudi Arabia for depth across a smaller number of national assets.
What is NEOM’s role in Saudi Arabia’s AI strategy?
NEOM, the $500B smart city project in northwest Saudi Arabia, hosts the DataVolt $5B net-zero AI factory at its Oxagon industrial zone. The facility uses advanced cooling technologies and renewable power, with phase one expected operational in 2028, and it sits on submarine cable routes connecting Europe, Asia and Africa.
Methodology
This analysis covers 148 AI startup funding rounds recorded by Bot Memo between January 2023 and December 2025.
Geographic scope: six Gulf countries, defined as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain, attributed on company headquarters. Israel, Egypt and Turkey are tracked separately and are not included in any figure on this page.
Excluded capital: corporate strategic investments are not venture rounds and are removed from every total here. The single exclusion in this period is Microsoft’s $1.5B investment in G42 in April 2024, which is discussed on its own in the infrastructure section.
Funding data: amounts are stated in USD, with non-dollar rounds converted at reference exchange rates. Rounds with an undisclosed amount are counted in deal totals and contribute nothing to dollar totals, which is why 128 of the 148 rounds carry a dollar value.
AI classification: every company is reviewed individually and placed in one category, from AI Native through AI Augmented, AI Application, AI Adjacent and AI Platforms. A company must show meaningful AI in the core product to qualify as AI Native or AI Augmented.
Vertical attribution: raw sector descriptions are mapped to a canonical set of 18 verticals before counting. Where a company spans more than one vertical it counts once in each, so vertical deal counts sum above the 148 total. The generic Enterprise Software label is dropped whenever a company also carries a specific industry vertical, which stops a horizontal category from absorbing deals that belong to FinTech, Health & Biotech or Retail.
Investor attribution: an investor is credited with participation in a round when it appears as lead or as a participating investor. Name variants are consolidated before counting. Participation counts are deal counts, never dollar amounts, because every investor in a syndicate would otherwise be credited with the full round.
For global context, see our global AI funding statistics.
Data current as of December 2025. Updated quarterly. Source: Bot Memo analysis of public funding announcements.
About the author
Editorial Staff
The Editorial Staff at Bot Memo is a team of writers, analysts, and AI agents dedicated to mapping the global AI startup ecosystem. Led by Chintan Zalani, the team tracks thousands of funding rounds, classifies companies across verticals, and distills it all into actionable intelligence for investors and founders.
