Marlize van Romburgh

Along with a sizzling AI market, other trends that emerged from our reporting and data include a cooler seed funding environment and hotter M&A market. We provide a look with a dozen charts that underscore the major trends in startups leading into 2025.

The startup world begins 2025 on a decidedly more upbeat note than it did the previous year. The renewed optimism is in part due to the modest uptick in venture funding last year, when global startup investment finally topped pre-pandemic levels again.

Livestream shopping platform Whatnot raised $265 million at a nearly $5 billion valuation in a round led by Greycroft, DST Global and Avra.

Although 2024 was an exceptionally lackluster year for new public offerings, the IPO market could gain momentum in 2025. In tht vein, the Crunchbase News team presents 13 companies we think could be top contenders to go public if our 2025 market forecast bears out.

AI cloud infrastructure startup Vultr raised $333 million in growth financing at a $3.5 billion valuation, marking the decade-old startup’s first outside round of financing.

Databricks raised $10 billion at a $62 billion valuation, marking the largest venture capital raise of 2024 and one of the largest on record — even surpassing the $6.6 billion raised by generative AI giant OpenAI this fall.

Tenstorrent, the chip startup led by vaunted semiconductor engineer Jim Keller, says it raised more than $693 million in a Series D funding that gives it a $2 billion pre-money valuation.

What are the big business stories you’re watching in the new year? Are you gearing up to raise new capital in 2025? Or are you cutting costs? These are among the questions we’d like your thoughts on for our latest brief Crunchbase News reader survey.

Chemistry, a new early-stage VC firm founded by former Bessemer Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures investors, announced its launch Wednesday with a debut fund of $350 million dedicated to writing checks to seed and Series A startups.

Despite a strong pull from the AI sector, venture investment in the third quarter of 2024 wasn’t able to overcome its now more than two-year-long slump. Here's a look at Q3's numbers in charts.