As we look forwards to 2026, it’s also worth reflecting on some of 2025’s biggest funding moments.
2025 has been a monumental year for startup fundraising, with companies raising record levels of capital.
But which companies raised the biggest funding rounds of the year? Well, unsurprisingly, some big names like OpenAI top the list. In fact, AI accounts for a large proportion of companies mentioned.
But who else made headlines with their raises? We take a look.
The Biggest Funding Rounds Of 2025
OpenAI: $40 billion (March)
Back in March of this year, OpenAI launched their latest funding round to help continue AI research and scale their compute infrastructure. The round made records as one of the largest private tech funding rounds ever, showing companies can still raise huge sums even when they are private.
Round: Growth
Post-Raise Valuation: $300 billion
Led by: Softbank
Anthropic: $13 billion (September)
In September, Anthropic announced their Series F round, which closed at $13 billion. The company cited that the money would be used to research even further into AI safety and fuel their expansion internationally.
Round: Series F
Post-Raise Valuation: $183 billion
Led by: ICONIQ Capital
Anthropic: $3.5 billion (March)
Just a few months before their huge Series F round, Anthropic raised their Series E, which coincided with the launch of their Claude 3.7 Sonnet AI and Claude Code models. With the latest round, Anthropic aimed to continue research around AI systems and making sure AI continues to advance human progress.
Round: Series E
Post-Raise Valuation: $61.5 billion
Led by: Lightspeed Venture Partners
Anysphere: $2.3 billion (November)
Anysphere, the AI startup behind vibe coding tool Cursor, raised their Series D round which saw wide investor interest, including from Google and Nvidia.
Cursor has seen huge growth over the past few years, embedding itself into thousands of industries.
Round: Series D
Post-Raise Valuation: $29.3 billion
Led by: Accel and Coatue
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Reflection AI: $2 billion (October)
Reflection AI has set out to become America’s ‘open frontier AI lab’ taking on models like OpenAI and Anthropic as well as China’s DeepSeek. They focus on large open language models and are gearing up for their first release in early 2026.
Round: Series B
Post-Raise Valuation: $8 billion
Led by: Nvidia
Thinking Machines Lab: $2 billion (July)
Founded by a former OpenAI executive, Thinking Machine Lab raised one of the largest seed rounds in history with their July $2 billion seed raise.
The seed round was raised to help the company work towards its first ‘multimodal’ AI product.
Round: Seed
Post-Raise Valuation: $12 billion
Led by: Andreessen Horowitz
Mistral AI: $2 billion (Sept)
French AI startup Minstral raised a huge $2 billion in September, making it one of Europe’s most valuable AI companies. The round is going to be used to develop their AI even further, allowing it to solve complicated engineering and industrial problems, especially in the semiconductor space
Round: Series C
Post-Raise Valuation: $13.8 billion
Led by: ASML
Cerebras Systems: $1.1 billion (September)
Cerebras is an AI chip and supercomputing company, that is looking to grow its manufacturing capabilities to serve the increasing demand for AI data centres. The company was rumoured to be heading for an IPO, but later withdrew.
Round: Series G
Post-Raise Valuation: $8.1 billion
Led by: Fidelity Management & Research Company and Atreides Management
NScale: $1.1 billion (September)
Nscale made headlines in September for raising the largest Series B in European history. The company is looking to create more data centres and expand its AI platform across Europe, North America, and the Middle East.
Round: Series B
Post-Raise Valuation: $3.1 billion
Led by: Aker ASA
Groq: $750 million (September)
Groq, an AI chip startup that is innovating in AI inference announced a new funding round in September. The company is known for its Language Processing Unit chips which run trained AI models.
The new round aims to help it expand further into North America, Europe, and the Middle East, with plans to expand further into the Asia-Pacific region.
Round: Financing
Post-Raise Valuation: $6.9 billion
Led by: Disruptive
Sources: TechCrunch, EU Startups
