Investors pour $36.7 billion into AI start-ups in US from April to June, defying a downturn

SAN FRANCISCO - For two years, many unprofitable tech start-ups have cut costs, sold themselves or gone out of business. But the ones focused on artificial intelligence have been thriving.

Now the AI boom that started in late 2022 has become the strongest counterpoint to the broader start-up downturn.

Investors poured US$27.1 billion (S$36.7 billion) into AI start-ups in the United States from April to June, accounting for nearly half of all US start-up funding in that period, according to PitchBook, which tracks start-ups.

In total, US start-ups raised US$56 billion, up 57 per cent from a year earlier and the highest three-month haul in two years.

AI companies are attracting huge rounds of funding reminiscent of 2021, when low interest rates pushed investors away from taking risks on tech investments.

In May, CoreWeave, a provider of cloud computing services for AI companies, raised US$1.1 billion, followed by US$7.5 billion in debt, valuing it at US$19 billion.

Scale AI, a provider of data for AI companies, raised US$1 billion, valuing it at US$13.8 billion. And xAI, founded by Mr Elon Musk, raised US$6 billion, valuing it at US$24 billion.

Such financing rounds have boosted the industry’s overall deal-making by dollar amount and number of deals, said PitchBook research analyst Kyle Stanford.

“It’s not declining anymore,” he said. “The bottom has already fallen out.”

The activity has prompted some venture capital investors to change their message.

In 2023, Mr Tom Loverro, an investor at IVP, predicted a “mass extinction event” for start-ups and encouraged them to cut costs.

Last week, he declared that era over and christened this time the “Great Reawakening”, encouraging companies to “pour gas” on growth, particularly around AI.

“The AI train is leaving the station and you need to be on it,” he wrote on the social platform X.

The start-up downturn began in early 2022 as many money-losing companies struggled to grow as quickly as they did in the pandemic.

Rising interest rates also pushed investors to chase less risky investments. To make up for dwindling funding, start-ups slashed staff and scaled back their ambitions.

Then in late 2022, OpenAI kicked off a new boom with the release of its ChatGPT chatbot. Excitement around generative AI technology, which can produce text, images and videos, set off a frenzy of start-up creation and funding.

“Sam Altman cancelled the recession,” joked Mr Chen Siqi, founder of the start-up Runway Financial, referring to OpenAI’s chief executive.

Mr Chen said his company, which makes finance software, was growing faster than it otherwise would have because “AI can do the job of 1.5 people”.

Yet even as AI creates efficiencies, it is costly to build. Start-ups focused on AI need enormous stores of powerful computer chips and cloud storage.

An analysis of 125 AI start-ups by Kruze Consulting, an accounting and tax advisory firm, showed that the companies spent an average of 22 per cent of their expenses on computing costs in the first three months of the year – more than double the 10 per cent spent by non-AI software companies in the same period.

“No wonder venture capitalists are throwing money into these companies,” said Mr Healy Jones, Kruze’s vice-president of financial strategy.

While AI start-ups are growing faster than other start-ups, he said, “they clearly need the money”.

For investors who back fast-growing start-ups, there is little downside to being wrong about the next big thing, but there is enormous upside in being right.

AI’s potential has generated deafening hype, with prominent investors and executives predicting that the market for AI will be bigger than the markets for the smartphone, the personal computer, social media and the internet.

Stanford of PitchBook said competition from big tech companies including Microsoft and Amazon might also affect AI start-ups’ ability to raise enormous sums of money.

Large deals like the one struck by xAI were outliers and are not likely to be repeated in the second half of 2024. NYTIMES