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 almost $20 billion haul, in accordance with knowledge offered by Pitchbook, displaying how traders proceed to point out choice to AI.
Knowledge reveals that traders closed 795 offers in the united statesin 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 change. Different offers of be aware embrace a $82 million elevate from fee 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 almost 1 / 4 of recent 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 area and headline-grabbing antics, equivalent to OpenAI’s Sam Altman searching for trillions, and AI’s rise from technological novelty to family identify because of transformer fashions, would make one assume that there is instantly an investor choice for one over the opposite.
Traditionally, all knowledge reveals that VCs have usually favored AI over crypto, with AI and machine studying attracting constant funding that is expanded exponentially, in accordance with Statista knowledge, rising from $670 million in 2011 to $36 billion in 2020 and solely upwards from there.
There’s solely been one yr 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 yr.
Understand that all of this ignores crypto-native quirks like airdrops, which put recent capital within the palms of customers and, in flip, pump the token worth, inflating the dimensions of tasks’ treasuries.
A latest report from Dragonfly discovered that between 2020 and 2024, the 11 largest airdrops generated $7 billion. This would possibly not shut the hole between AI and crypto, but it surely reveals that there are extra methods to get a greenback than conventional enterprise capital.