General Catalyst led AI investing in 2025 with 59 deals, more than any other firm. Lightspeed Venture Partners led rounds worth $20.33B, the largest total among the year’s 20 most active AI investors. Across 5,421 AI funding deals totaling $297.5B, here’s who wrote the checks.
The 25 firms that led the most rounds account for 11.3% of every lead-investor slot in that data, 624 of 5,514. The median deal across the 4,843 rounds with a disclosed amount landed at $12.0M, but averages tell a different story when SoftBank’s $40.0B OpenAI round sits in the same dataset as a $2M seed check.
This analysis ranks investors by the metric that matters most for founders raising capital: deal count. A firm that writes 59 checks deploys across stages and geographies. A firm that leads one $40B mega-round does not.
On this page
- AI Funding in 2025: $297.5B Across 5,421 Deals
- Top 20 Most Active AI Investors in 2025, Ranked by Deal Count
- Biggest AI Checks: Investors by Total Funding Participated In
- Where Top AI Investors Are Placing Their Bets: Stage and Vertical Preferences
- Corporate AI Investors: Google, SoftBank, and the Expanding Strategic Footprint
- How to Evaluate an AI Investor: What the Data Reveals
- Frequently Asked Questions About AI Investors
- Methodology
AI Funding in 2025: $297.5B Across 5,421 Deals
Bot Memo tracked 5,421 AI funding deals in 2025, 4,843 of them with a disclosed amount, adding up to $297.5B. The year before, the same tracking covered 4,649 deals worth $207.5B.
The money did not spread evenly. Rounds of $100M or more made up 9.8% of disclosed deals (476 of 4,843) but 74.3% of the dollars. Twenty-nine rounds of $1B or more accounted for 41.6% on their own, and the ten largest rounds alone took 32.2%.
OpenAI’s $40.0B round is 13.4% of the year’s total by itself, which is why a dollar-weighted ranking says so little about who backs the most companies.
That skew is why deal count and dollar totals produce two different leaderboards, and why a founder raising a $12M Series A should read the first one. For the full breakdown of deal volumes and round sizes, see our 2025 AI startup funding statistics.
Top 20 Most Active AI Investors in 2025, Ranked by Deal Count
Deal count separates the consistently active from the occasionally massive. Here are the 20 firms that led the most AI funding rounds in 2025.
| Rank | Investor | Deals | Total Funding Participated In | Avg Deal Size | Top Stage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | General Catalyst | 59 | $5.44B | $92.1M | Seed (17) |
| 2 | Insight Partners | 52 | $6.77B | $130.1M | Series A (20) |
| 3 | Andreessen Horowitz | 45 | $6.74B | $149.7M | Seed (13) |
| 4 | Lightspeed Venture Partners | 44 | $20.33B | $462.0M | Seed (17) |
| 5 | Accel | 40 | $5.24B | $131.1M | Series A (12) |
| 6 | Sequoia Capital | 38 | $2.70B | $71.0M | Series A (11) |
| 7 | Khosla Ventures | 35 | $2.21B | $63.1M | Seed (11) |
| 8 | New Enterprise Associates | 30 | $2.19B | $73.2M | Series A (8) |
| 9 | Y Combinator | 24 | $113.1M | $4.7M | Seed (19) |
| 10 | Bessemer Venture Partners | 24 | $986.4M | $41.1M | Series A (7) |
| 11 | Menlo Ventures | 21 | $1.33B | $63.4M | Series A (8) |
| 12 | Bain Capital Ventures | 20 | $2.68B | $133.9M | Seed (7) |
| 13 | Index Ventures | 20 | $1,015.0M | $50.8M | Seed (7) |
| 14 | Base10 Partners | 20 | $302.0M | $15.1M | Seed (11) |
| 15 | Felicis | 19 | $462.3M | $24.3M | Seed (10) |
| 16 | Kleiner Perkins | 19 | $2.46B | $129.2M | Seed (5) |
| 17 | Battery Ventures | 16 | $579.1M | $36.2M | Seed (6) |
| 18 | Lux Capital | 14 | $846.2M | $60.4M | Seed (6) |
| 19 | Nexus Venture Partners | 13 | $157.9M | $12.1M | Seed (6) |
| 20 | Google Ventures | 13 | $2.12B | $163.0M | Series A (3) |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 5,421 AI deals (2025). Deal counts reflect lead-investor roles. Funding figures reflect total round sizes where the firm was named as a lead, not individual check sizes.
General Catalyst’s 59 deals came in at a $92.1M average, the lowest of the top five by dollars. Seed was its most common entry point (17 deals), and its portfolio spans Titan, an AI-augmented IT services platform that raised $74M, and Prepared, which raised an $80M Series C for emergency response AI. Both rounds were New York deals, which is where 14 of the firm’s 59 landed.
See our breakdown of every AI deal General Catalyst made for the full portfolio.
Insight Partners, at 52 deals, leaned into Series A (20 deals) and Series B (16), making it the most active growth-stage AI investor. Cynomi, a virtual CISO platform that raised a $37M Series B in London, and Reco, an AI-native SaaS security company that raised $25M, represent the enterprise thesis.
Andreessen Horowitz backed 45 rounds worth $6.74B, with seed as its most common stage (13 deals) and San Francisco as its dominant city (20 of 45). For the full portfolio breakdown, see our analysis of every AI deal a16z made.
Biggest AI Checks: Investors by Total Funding Participated In
Deal count measures activity. Total funding participated in measures where the largest rounds landed.
Re-sort those 20 firms by dollars and the order changes. Thrive Capital joins them here: 10 rounds was too few for the activity table, and enough money to place sixth on this one.
| Rank | Investor | Total Funding Participated In | Deals | Avg Deal Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lightspeed Venture Partners | $20.33B | 44 | $462.0M |
| 2 | Insight Partners | $6.77B | 52 | $130.1M |
| 3 | Andreessen Horowitz | $6.74B | 45 | $149.7M |
| 4 | General Catalyst | $5.44B | 59 | $92.1M |
| 5 | Accel | $5.24B | 40 | $131.1M |
| 6 | Thrive Capital | $2.80B | 10 | $279.7M |
| 7 | Sequoia Capital | $2.70B | 38 | $71.0M |
| 8 | Bain Capital Ventures | $2.68B | 20 | $133.9M |
| 9 | Kleiner Perkins | $2.46B | 19 | $129.2M |
| 10 | Khosla Ventures | $2.21B | 35 | $63.1M |
Source: Bot Memo analysis of 5,421 AI deals (2025). Covers the 20 firms ranked above plus Thrive Capital. Figures reflect total round sizes the firm led, not individual commitments.
Lightspeed’s $20.33B is the product of two rounds. The firm led Anthropic’s $3.5B Series E and co-led the $13B Series F, and those two lines account for 81% of its 2025 total. Strip them out and the picture is closer to Cyera’s $540M round in New York, or the 17 seed rounds Lightspeed led that year.
Thrive Capital’s $2.80B came from 10 deals, the fewest of any firm on this table, at a $279.7M average. Databricks’ $1.0B Series K and Anysphere’s $900M Series C carried most of it. Thrive writes small numbers of large checks, mostly at Series A and later.
Khosla Ventures ranks 7th by deals and 10th by dollars, which is what a seed-weighted book looks like. Its largest 2025 round was ClickHouse’s $350M Series C; its most common stage was seed (11 of 35 deals); and its $63.1M average sits below every firm above it on this table.
The gap between General Catalyst (1st by deals, 4th by dollars) and Lightspeed (4th by deals, 1st by dollars) marks two strategies. General Catalyst spreads across 59 bets at a $92.1M average. Lightspeed concentrates, and one company set its number.
Where Top AI Investors Are Placing Their Bets: Stage and Vertical Preferences
The most active AI venture capital firms in 2025 shared a clear preference for seed stage.
Six of the top 10 investors by deal count had seed as their first or second most common stage. General Catalyst led 17 seed rounds. Lightspeed also led 17. Y Combinator, by design, led 19.
This cuts against the idea that AI investing has moved entirely to late-stage mega-rounds. The dollars did concentrate at the top, where 476 rounds of $100M or more took 74.3% of the year’s capital. Deal count went the other way. Seed investors wrote more checks than ever in 2025, and the rounds were smaller.
Stage Distribution Patterns
Three investor archetypes emerged from the data. Percentages below count Seed rounds only, so pre-seed sits outside them.
Seed-heavy deployers: Y Combinator (79% seed, 19 of 24), AIX Ventures (64%, 7 of 11), Base10 Partners (55%, 11 of 20), and Felicis (53%, 10 of 19). These firms bet early and often.
Mercor, a Felicis-backed AI talent and model-training platform, raised a $100M Series B in early 2025 before closing a $350M Series C later that year. Darwin AI, a Base10-backed AI agent platform for sales and customer support out of São Paulo, raised a $4.5M seed round.
Series A specialists: Insight Partners (38% Series A, 20 of 52), Accel (30%, 12 of 40), Sequoia Capital (29%, 11 of 38). These firms pick winners after initial traction. Sequoia co-led Decart (real-time AI generation) through a $100M Series B, which is the shape of a conviction bet at the scaling point. For the complete 2025 portfolio, see every AI deal Sequoia made.
Full-stack investors: General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and Lightspeed each led rounds from seed through Series D or later, with meaningful volume at every step.
Geographic Concentration
San Francisco dominates. It is the top city for 9 of the top 10 investors by deal count. The exception is Insight Partners, which led 16 rounds in New York against 6 in San Francisco. New York is the runner-up city for the other nine.
Battery Ventures is the other outlier worth watching. Tel Aviv ties San Francisco at 4 deals each, which reflects the firm’s Israel thesis. Nexus Venture Partners, at 13 deals, works the India-to-US corridor, with 7 of those deals in San Francisco.
For city-level analysis of where AI funding landed, see our breakdown of AI startup funding by city.
Corporate AI Investors: Google, SoftBank, and the Expanding Strategic Footprint
Corporate venture arms played a different game in 2025. Where traditional VCs optimize for portfolio breadth, corporate investors optimize for strategic alignment.
Google Ventures led 13 AI rounds worth $2.12B, at a $163.0M average deal size. Its 2025 bets span infrastructure (Redpanda, a streaming data platform that raised $100M) and applications (Navier, an autonomous engineering company that raised a $5.6M seed round). For investors backing AI from the corporate side, that spread is a useful template.
SoftBank redefined the scale of corporate venture capital AI investments by leading OpenAI’s $40.0B round, the largest single financing in our 2025 data by a factor of nearly three.
Microsoft runs a third model. Its AI position sits in infrastructure commitments and cloud credits rather than lead positions in priced rounds, so it does not show up on a deal-count leaderboard at all.
The distinction matters for founders. Corporate investors bring distribution channels and technical infrastructure that financial VCs cannot.
A GV-backed AI startup gets proximity to Google Cloud. A SoftBank-backed company gets access to a global portfolio of operating companies. Corporate money also brings strategic constraints that a financial investor does not impose.
How to Evaluate an AI Investor: What the Data Reveals
Not all artificial intelligence investors are equal, and deal count alone is an incomplete signal. Choosing between AI investment firms means reading past the headline number. Five patterns from Bot Memo’s 2025 data are worth weighing.
Average check size hides more than it reveals. Lightspeed’s $462.0M average comes from two Anthropic rounds. The firm also led 17 seed rounds that year. For a pre-seed founder, the seed count is the number that predicts fit.
Stage alignment predicts follow-on behavior. Firms with heavy seed allocations (Base10 at 55%, Felicis at 53%) are structurally set up to support a Series A. Firms concentrated at Series A (Insight Partners at 38%) signal stronger growth-stage support and less seed appetite.
Geographic presence reveals network value. Sequoia Capital led 16 rounds in San Francisco, 5 in New York and 2 in Tel Aviv, which maps to the firm’s office footprint. Insight Partners runs the opposite pattern, with 16 of its 52 deals in New York.
Most rounds have one name on the lead line. Of the 4,372 2025 rounds with a named lead, 78.5% list exactly one firm. Co-leads cluster at the top of the market, where 31.2% of rounds at $100M or more had two or more leads, against 21.4% below that line. A founder raising $15M should plan for one lead, not a syndicate.
Emerging managers deserve attention. AIX Ventures (11 deals, $140.8M) and Radical Ventures (11 deals, $716.5M) are smaller firms punching above their weight in AI deal flow. Radical led Cohere‘s $500M round and Latent Labs’ $50M Series A in London, a range that runs from enterprise language models to programmable biology.
The highest-signal data point for founders is stage distribution inside a firm’s portfolio. A firm that led 17 seed rounds (General Catalyst) is structurally different from one that led 20 Series A rounds (Insight Partners), even when both sit in the top five.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI Investors
Who are the most active investors in AI in 2025?
By deal count, General Catalyst (59 deals), Insight Partners (52) and Andreessen Horowitz (45) led AI investing in 2025. By total funding participated in, the order changes: Lightspeed Venture Partners ($20.33B), Insight Partners ($6.77B) and Andreessen Horowitz ($6.74B). Dollar figures cover full round values where the firm was named as a lead, not individual check sizes.
Which venture capital firms invest the most in AI startups?
Lightspeed Venture Partners (44 deals), Accel (40) and Sequoia Capital (38) round out the top tier of AI venture capital firms by activity. At seed specifically, Y Combinator (19 seed rounds), General Catalyst (17) and Lightspeed (17) were the most active. For growth-stage AI funding, Insight Partners led with 20 Series A and 16 Series B rounds.
How much venture capital went into AI in 2025?
Bot Memo tracked $297.5B across 5,421 AI deals in 2025, of which 4,843 carried a disclosed amount. That total covers venture rounds, corporate and strategic investments, and growth deals. The median deal was $12.0M and the mean was $61.4M, a gap created by 29 rounds of $1B or more.
What share of AI funding went to US startups in 2025?
US-headquartered companies took 79.7% of AI funding dollars in 2025 and 56.6% of disclosed deals (2,742 of 4,843). The dollar share runs well ahead of the deal share because the largest rounds of the year, led by OpenAI’s $40.0B, were raised by US companies.
Which investors led the most AI funding rounds in 2025?
General Catalyst led with 59 deals, followed by Insight Partners (52), Andreessen Horowitz (45), Lightspeed Venture Partners (44) and Accel (40). Those five firms led 240 AI rounds between them. At the earliest stages, Y Combinator (24 deals, 79% seed) and Felicis (19 deals, 53% seed) were the most prolific seed investors.
Are AI investments still growing in 2025?
Yes. Bot Memo tracked $297.5B across 5,421 AI deals in 2025, against $207.5B across 4,649 deals in 2024. Growth ran heavier in dollars than in deals. The 476 rounds of $100M or more took 74.3% of the year’s capital, while the median deal moved from $11.0M to $12.0M.
What is the average AI startup funding round size?
The mean AI round in 2025 was $61.4M and the median was $12.0M. The mean is pulled up by 29 rounds of $1B or more, so the median is the better planning number for founders. At Series A the median was $15.5M, with the middle half of rounds between $10.0M and $25.0M.
Methodology
This analysis covers 5,421 AI funding deals tracked by Bot Memo throughout 2025, representing $297.5B across the 4,843 rounds with a disclosed amount.
Investor attribution: A firm is credited with a deal when it is named as a lead investor on the round, and it is attributed the full round amount. “Participated in deals worth $20.33B” (Lightspeed Venture Partners) is the total value of rounds the firm led, not the firm’s own check size. Summing investor totals will exceed the dataset total several times over.
Scope: Deals classified as AI Native, AI Augmented, AI Adjacent or AI Platforms. Venture firms, acquisitions and non-AI companies are excluded. Coverage is global, with US companies making up the majority of deals.
Currency: Rounds raised outside the US are converted to USD, so a euro, yen or rupee round is comparable to a dollar round throughout.
Bot Memo catalogs AI startups worldwide to surface investable market gaps.
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.
