Over the past few years, the number of venture capital deals has plummeted, with Q3 of 2024 marking the ninth consecutive quarter in this decline. (CrunchBase News)
According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, 75% of venture-backed startups are bound to fail, a shocking statistic that has made investors and VC capitalists increasingly selective in their investment decisions.
Amidst the skepticism and volatile nature of the startup market - often characterized by rapid ascendance and dramatic downfall - Global data shows that more than 341 startups globally secured mega round ($100 million+) funding in the first three quarters of 2024 with the U.S. holding 55.4% of such deals.
This selectiveness has popularized investment in some sectors like the AI industry.
According to CB Insights, 1 in 3 (31%) of all venture funding in Q3 of 2024, went to AI startups, with Open AI’s $6.6 billion in October marking an all-time high.
In this article, we will consider the startups that have positioned themselves to convince investors that they belong to the 25% that are destined to succeed.
This article combines open-access resources and proprietary data to present accurate, up-to-date statistics and relevant developments in the startup economy.
Our methodology involves:
While we strive for accuracy, trends in the startup space are shifting rapidly.
These statistics reflect current patterns and should not be considered permanent facts.
Startups, refer to companies in their early stages of operation, so you wouldn’t expect to see Apple Inc., Amazon or Ant Group in this list, as they are beyond the startup category.
Here are the startups that secured $100 million or above in the last 10 months of 2024 based on publicly available data:
ChatGPT maker OpenAI has closed the largest VC round of all time, a $6.6 billion funding round that values the company at $157 billion post-money.
The investors' participation — which reportedly stipulates that they shouldn't invest in rival AI companies — comes as OpenAI is discussing how to transform from a nonprofit organization into a more traditional for-profit company and several high-profile executives have left to join rivals or start their own venture. (Reuters)
If the ChatGPT-maker doesn't complete its transition to a for-profit company within two years, investors in the latest round could ask for their money back.
When it was founded in 2015, OpenAI was a nonprofit, by 2019, it added a for-profit arm to raise money, but it said it would still focus on creating safe artificial general intelligence that benefits humanity.
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI raised $6 billion in series B funding in May, reaching a post-money valuation of $24 billion according to a post on their official website.
The San Francisco-based startup was founded in July 2023 as an alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT, and has recorded remarkable strides over the past year plus.
From the release of Grok-1 on X in November, to the recent announcements of the improved Grok-1.5 model with long context capability, to Grok-1.5V with image understanding, and the grand fundraising in May, led by Valor Equity Partners, Vy Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital amongst others.
The funds from the round will be used to take xAI’s first products to market, build advanced infrastructure, and accelerate the R&D of future technologies.
Waymo was founded on January 17, 2009, as the Google Self-Driving Car Project and became an independent company on December 13, 2016, with its headquarters in Mountain View California.
The self-driving vehicle company closed a $5.6 billion Series C funding round in October, to expand its robotaxi service in and beyond Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix, where it operates today. (CNBC)
The company is owned by Google parent Alphabet, which led the series C investment in Waymo, alongside earlier backers including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Fidelity, Perry Creek, Silver Lake, Tiger Global and T. Rowe Price.
“With this latest investment, we will continue to welcome more riders into our Waymo One ride-hailing service in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, and in Austin and Atlanta through our expanded partnership with Uber,” said Waymo co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov.
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives Amodei and his sister Daniela, Anthropic focuses on creating AI systems that are interpretable, safe and steerable, prioritizing models that follow ethical guidelines to minimize harmful or unpredictable outputs.
The San Francisco-based startup raised a whopping $4 billion in a funding round led by Amazon ($2.75 billion) alongside battery company Ascend Elements ($704 million) and Figure AI ($675 million). (KPMG)
The $1.5 billion Series F round in August, led by Founders Fund — Peter Thiel's venture capital firm — and Sands Capital, valued the Anduril at $14 billion, up from $8.5 billion last year.
Anduril has ambitions of becoming the next great American defense contractor, joining a class of companies that has shrunk to just five major firms that pull in billions in revenue from business with the U.S. Department of Defense.
The Palmer Luckey-founded defense startup is looking to become a serious rival to these long-standing kingpins, and its recent wins have started to draw notice.
Earlier this year, the company beat out Lockheed, Northrop and Boeing in a program to develop and test small unmanned fighter jet prototypes.
Anduril is also betting that it can have an edge in contracts simply by moving faster than its competitors: bringing a Silicon Valley mentality to defense production, which moves notoriously slowly.
The California-based autonomous weapons maker announced that it would invest "hundreds of millions" of dollars in the development of a 5 million-square-foot factory named Arsenal-1.
CoreWeave, the GPU infrastructure provider that began life as a cryptocurrency mining operation, this week raised $1.1 billion in new funding from investors including Coatue, Fidelity and Altimeter Capital. (Techcrunch)
Reportedly valuing the startup at $19 billion post-money, the new financing brings CoreWeave’s total raised to $5 billion in debt and equity – a remarkable figure for a less-than-a-decade-old company.
According to CoreWeave co-founder and CEO Mike Intrator, new funding will be used to support the rapid growth across all areas of the business, and expansion into new geographic regions to meet the explosive demand for GPU-accelerated cloud infrastructure worldwide.
The San Francisco-based Artificial intelligence startup Scale AI - which provides data-labeling services to companies that want to train machine learning models - raised $1 billion in a Series F round in May.
Scale Ai’s funding round that valued the enterprise tech company at $13.8 billion was led by Accel and includes Cisco Investments alongside tech giants like Meta and Amazon.
The 8-year-old startup plays a key role in the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) and large language models (LLM), with the data — whether it is text, images, video or voice recordings — needing to be labeled correctly before it can be digested and used effectively by AI technology.
According to Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale Ai, “Our calling is to build the data foundry for AI, and with today’s funding, we’re moving into the next phase of that journey – accelerating the abundance of frontier data that will pave our road to AGI.” (Scale)
Xaira Therapeutics, a San Francisco-based biotech firm says the company is ready to start developing drugs that were impossible to make without recent breakthroughs in AI.
The advances in foundational models come from the University of Washington’s Institute of Protein Design, run by David Baker, one of Xaira’s co-founders.
The less than one-year-old startup came out of stealth and announced it had secured more than $1 billion of committed capital from lead investors Arch Venture Partners and Foresite Capital — both of which jointly incubated the company — as well as several other big-name investors including Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. (Crunchbase News)
Also on staff will be the researchers who developed models for protein and antibody design called RFdiffusion and RFantibody in Baker’s lab.
The biotech will use these models to develop new ways to connect biological targets and engineered molecules to human diseases while combining machine learning, data generation, and therapeutic product development to build a platform for drug discovery.
AI research lab Safe Superintelligence (SSI), launched in June - just one month after its co-founder Ilya Sutskever formally left OpenAI is worth about $5 billion today.
Sutskever co-founded SSI in June with Gross, who previously led AI initiatives at Apple (AAPL.O), and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher.
The Palo Alto-based startup which currently has 10 employees, raised $1 billion in September to help acquire computing power and hire top talent, with a focus on building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel. (Reuters)
AI safety, which refers to preventing AI from causing harm, is a hot topic amid fears that rogue AI could act against the interests of humanity or even cause human extinction.
A proposed California bill that has proven controversial in the industry which seeks to put safety regulations and guardrails on AI has split the industry— opposed by companies like OpenAI and Google and supported by Anthropic and Elon Musk's xAI.
Another big catch from the Asia-Pacific region is the Beijing-based Moonshot AI, known in Chinese as Yuezhi Anmian.
The Chinese artificial intelligence start-up raised more than $1 billion in a new funding round led by e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding and venture capital firm HongShan, as interest among investors remains high for innovative mainland enterprises similar to ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
Founded in March 2023, the start-up in October launched the smart chatbot Kimi Chat, built on its self-developed Moonshot large language model.
According to the startup’s co-founder and CEO Yang Zhilin, this latest injection of capital would value Moonshot AI at $2.5 billion. (South China Morning Post)
Founded in 2013 by Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan, Cruise tests and develops autonomous car technology, serving majorly as the autonomous subsidiary of General Motors.
The auto giant General Motors, agreed to pump another $850 million into the San Francisco-based startup. (Crunchbase News)
Cruise has launched small fleets in Phoenix, Dallas, and now Houston that will operate with a human safety driver behind the wheel in a bid to validate its technology and move slowly in order to win back public trust.
Radiology Partners (RP), the California-based firm was founded in 2012 by Rich Whitney and Dr. Anthony Gabriel.
According to a report on the company’s website, RP closed a growth equity investment funding round of approximately $720 million.
With Kirkland & Ellis and Sidley Austin serving as legal counsel to Rad Partners in the transaction, while Moelis & Company and Barclays Capital provided financial guidance.
Radiology Partners employs over 3,600 physicians who service 3,300 hospitals and outpatient facilities across all 50 states.
According to Rich Whitney co-founder and CEO, the new funding will be used to meaningfully reduce RP’s debt and successfully extend outstanding debt maturities with new maturity dates ranging from 2028 to 2030 while retaining about $500 million of cash and liquidity to fund R&D.
Alphasense is a New York-based startup founded in 2011 that provides market intelligence and search platforms powered by AI and natural language processing, which helps clients develop corporate and investment strategies.
The AI search engine startup in June raised $650 million in a Series F funding co-led by Viking Global Investors and BDT & MSD Partners at a $4 billion valuation — a 75% increase from just nine months ago. (Crunchbase News)
As part of the deal, AlphaSense acquired expert research startup Tegus for $930 million.
In total, the company has now raised $1.4 billion since its founding, per Crunchbase.
Mistral AI, a French tech startup secured €600 million ($645 million) in a Series B funding round that values Mistral AI at €5.8 billion (about $6.2 billion), as huge amounts of money continue to pour into the artificial intelligence race. (CNBC News)
The round was led by General Catalyst and includes a long list of investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, Samsung Venture Investment, Salesforce Ventures. (Crunchbase News)
The startup which was co-founded by alumni from Meta and Google’s DeepMind Arthur Mensch in 2023, is working on foundational models with the aim to rival the best-performing models today, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude3 and Meta’s Llama 3.
Founded in 2023 by Jason Warner and Eiso Kant, Poolside builds artificial intelligence software for programmers.
The Paris-based startup raised $500 million in a Series B fundraising round led by Bain Capital Ventures which values the startup at $3 billion. (Crunchbase News)
The round also included investment from several corporate and institutional investors such as Nvidia, DST Global, StepStone Group, Citi Ventures and HSBC Ventures.
Insider, the Istanbul-based startup developing AI-powered marketing software, raised a $500 million Series E funding round led by General Atlantic. (Insider)
According to Hande Cilingir, Co-Founder and CEO at Insider, the company plans to further develop its offering and invest heavily in research and development (R&D), focusing on expanding and advancing its AI solutions.
The company also intends to scale its talent base and geographic footprint, leveraging General Atlantic’s global platform as it explores strategic M&A opportunities.
Founded in 2018 by visionaries Chase Lochmiller and Cully Cavness, Crusoe Energy has positioned itself within the fast-growing “neo-cloud” industry that provides outsourced cloud computing for other tech companies to build AI.
Crusoe Energy supports sustainability by using waste natural gas from oilfields to power its data centers, helping to cut greenhouse gas emissions while fueling AI and cloud computing.
The Denver-based startup raised $500 million in equity capital led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Felicis Ventures, an existing investment that also participated in this round. (Trading view)
The latest startup in the space to get a big chunk of cash is Beta Technologies, maker of electric vertical take-off and landing planes.
The South Burlington, Vermont-based startup this week announced a Series C led by Qatar Investment Authority, Fidelity Management & Research Company, TPG Rise Climate Fund and United Therapeutics also joined as investors.
Beta Technologies has raised $318 million in fresh capital through a Series C funding round to support efforts to bring its Alia electric aircraft to market. (Reuters)
Cornerstone Financing, an insurance and investment funding company headquartered in Bloomfield, NJ, has secured $285 million in aggregate financing led by Aquiline Capital Partners LP and Nomura. (Crunchbase)
Founded by Craig Corn and Daniel Anderson, Cornerstone merges structured finance and insurance wholesale distribution through its innovative product, CHEIFS, to utilize previously untapped home equity to enable superior estate, insurance, and investment planning through trusted advisors.
Currently operating in Arizona, California, Florida, and Pennsylvania, Cornerstone plans to expand nationally, expanding its distribution partnerships.
Founded in 2015 by Yevgeny Dibrov (CEO) and Nadir Izrael (CTO), Armis currently employs around 750 people globally, including in Israel.
The Armis platform enables businesses to monitor, secure, and manage their critical assets—ranging from IT and OT systems to medical devices, cloud infrastructure, and software.
The startup raised $200 million in a Series D funding round in October, at a company valuation of $4.3 billion, led by General Catalyst and Alkeon Capital, along with existing investors Brookfield and Georgian according to a report by Calcalistech.
Sierra, founded in 2023 by Taylor and Clay Bavor, focuses on selling AI-powered customer service chatbots to brands like WeightWatchers and SiriusXM.
The platform connects to other enterprise systems to undertake tasks on behalf of the customer without human involvement.
The AI startup headquartered in San Francisco, raised $175 million in a funding round that values it at $4.5 billion, led by Greenoaks Capital alongside other investors like ICONIQ and Thrive Capital. (Techcrunch)
The Israeli fintech company Melio has secured $150 million in a Series E funding round at a $2 billion valuation according to Calcalistech.
Founded in 2018, Melio is led by CEO and co-founder Matan Bar, alongside around 600 employees, with approximately 400 based in its Israel offices and the rest in the U.S.
Melio has developed an advanced digital platform enabling a range of payment solutions for businesses in the U.S., providing an overlay on top of basic services offered by partners, including financial institutions and software companies.
This Series E round was led by digital banking services giant Fiserv, with participation from Shopify, Capital One, Frontline Ventures, and existing investors Accel, Bessemer, Coatue, General Catalyst, Latitude, and Thrive Capital.
The Boston-based biotech startup founded in 2020, Axonis Therapeutics, is developing novel medicines for pain and epilepsy, locked up a $115 million Series A co-led by Cormorant Asset Management and venBio Partners. (Biopharma Dive)
The fresh funds will be used to push Axonis’ most advanced drug through key experiments designed to validate the underlying idea behind it and show it works as intended in people.
The drug, which should enter human testing this year, is meant to treat epilepsy and pain by amplifying KCC2, a protein vital for brain function.
Founded in 2020, Evommune, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company discovering and developing new ways to treat immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, raised $115 million in Series C financing led by RA Capital Management and Sectoral Asset Management. (PR Newswire)
The Palo Alto, California-based biotech startup plans to use the proceeds from the round to support the continued advancement of its lead clinical programs in chronic urticaria and atopic dermatitis, including multiple Phase 2 studies of EVO756.
Duetti, a music platform democratizing catalog monetization for independent artists, raised $114 million in new funding.
This includes $34 million in equity financing led by Flexpoint Ford, along with participation from existing investors Nyca Partners and Viola Ventures.
Additionally, Duetti successfully completed its inaugural $80 million privately rated asset-backed securitization (ABS) transaction, backed by a highly diversified music rights catalog with Barclays acting as the sole structuring and placement agent for the ABS. (PR Newswire)
The company aims to use the proceeds from its new funding to accelerate its acquisition of music catalogs and expand its proprietary forecasting, pricing, sourcing, and marketing technology.
Founded in 2019, Shenzhen-based autonomous driving startup DeepRoute, secured $100 million in Series C1 funding. (CnVEPost)
The funding will enhance the development of end-to-end model DeepRoute IO, help expand global automaker collaborations and explore future robotaxi businesses, and support the recruitment of more AI-native talents, DeepRoute said.
DeepRoute IO will utilize the VLA Model (Vision-Language-Action Model), A smart driving system that has higher-level thinking capabilities, able to understand complex interaction events, hidden semantic information and reason logically in traffic scenarios.
DoorLoop, an Israeli startup founded in 2019, developed an online software platform for managing rental properties, secured $100 million in a Series B financing round, led by US investment fund JMI Equity in October reaching a valuation of $500 million.
The founding CEO Ori Tamuz, plans to embark on a hiring spree to bolster the headcount of the company’s Tel Aviv R&D center from 50 to 200 full-time employees over the next 18 months according to a report by the Times of Israel.
DoorLoop’s platform helps landlords, property managers, and real estate companies automate management processes for residential and commercial properties and student housing primarily in the US market.
Looking closely at the 2024 VC landscape, one would observe that:
