From Washington: In a development that will reverberate across the Pacific, global venture capital shattered every previous record in February, with Crunchbase data showing $189 billion flowed into startups in a single month. The figure is extraordinary by any measure, but the story beneath it is one of breathtaking concentration: three American companies collected the overwhelming bulk of it.
That record spending was more than three times the global VC spend in January and was dominated by mammoth funding rounds from just three companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Waymo. OpenAI's latest $110 billion raise led the pack, one of the largest private rounds ever raised, valuing the company at $730 billion. To put that single transaction in perspective for Australian readers: it exceeds the entire annual budget of the Australian federal government.
Anthropic raised $30 billion, marking the third-largest venture round on record. Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving division, raised $16 billion. Together, those three rounds totalled $156 billion, representing 83% of the global venture capital raised in February.
AI-related startups raised $171 billion in February, accounting for 90% of global venture funding. The concentration does not stop at the sector level. The amount raised by just OpenAI, Anthropic, and Waymo last month was one-third of the total $425 billion venture spend across all of 2025, according to Crunchbase. That is a startling compression of capital into a vanishingly small number of bets.
Beyond those headline giants, a further four companies each raised $1 billion or more last month: Tokyo-based semiconductor manufacturer Rapidus; London-based self-driving platform Wayve; San Francisco-based AI-for-robotics company World Labs; and Sunnyvale, California-based AI semiconductor company Cerebras Systems.
The split between private enthusiasm and public caution
Two months into the year, the public and private markets are off to a very different start. Despite optimism that the IPO momentum seen in 2025 would continue into 2026, public market volatility and uncertainty have stalled new offerings again. Mobile marketing firm Liftoff and fintech brokerage firm Clear Street both withdrew their listings last month. The divergence raises a pointed question: if the private valuations being written in Silicon Valley are real, why are the public markets not yet buying in?
Sceptics of the current AI funding cycle have a reasonable case to make. Developing and training AI models is extremely expensive, which is a big reason why Anthropic and OpenAI continue raising such large sums, as they have to pour money into computing resources like Nvidia's graphics processing units. OpenAI's own financial projections are sobering: investment bank HSBC projects that between now and 2030, OpenAI will face a cumulative $207 billion gap between the revenue it generates and what it needs to spend, despite bringing in as much as $213 billion in revenue over that span. That is not a company in equilibrium; it is a company in a race against its own burn rate.
What the concentration means for the rest of the market
Seed-stage funding was down around 11% year-on-year with $2.6 billion raised, per Crunchbase data. That figure is easy to overlook amid the headline billions, but it matters. The earliest-stage companies, where genuine innovation tends to germinate, are getting a smaller share of a record-breaking pool. Early-stage funding held up better, with $13.1 billion invested at that level, up 47% year-on-year. The picture, then, is one where the very top and the middle are rising, but the very bottom is being squeezed.
Defenders of the current dynamic argue that the scale of AI infrastructure investment is simply what the technology demands. OpenAI claims it now has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million consumer subscribers, with January and February on track to be the company's largest months for new subscribers in its history. Demand at that scale requires capital at that scale, and there is a coherent economic argument that the returns will eventually justify the outlay.
For Australia, the implications are layered. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has been working to position Australian technology exporters within global supply chains, but as capital concentrates into a handful of American and European AI titans, the competitive runway for Australian startups seeking foreign investment narrows. The Australian Bureau of Statistics tracks domestic venture flows separately, but the gravitational pull of mega-rounds offshore shapes the risk appetite of local investors too.
The honest assessment of February's numbers is that they represent both a genuine technological inflection point and a concentration of financial risk that would give any prudent investor pause. The AI revolution may well deliver on its promise; the companies attracting this capital are generating real revenue and real users. But when three firms absorb 83% of a record month's global investment, the word "market" starts to feel like a courtesy title. Whether that concentration proves to be the efficient allocation of capital toward the highest-return opportunities, or the early architecture of a correction, is a question that February's data alone cannot answer.