🌊 AI startups raising >$100M
How top 1% startups use AI, raise capital, and go-to-market.
I’m Ivan. This is a newsletter about startups and investing—for founders and investors. Each week I cover how top 1% startups use AI, raise capital, and go-to-market.
Hello there,
Big week in ai and venture capital land, here’s what stood out:
🌊 AI
In Q3 2025, 25 startups raised $100M+, mostly in AI. Giants like Anthropic ($13B), Mistral ($1.99B), and Cohere ($500M) led the way, alongside verticals like EliseAI (real estate) or Ambience (healthcare) plus infra bets like Lambda, Baseten, fal.
I published a list of 20+ YC startups building Voice AI in 2024/25, everything from call center agents (Freya, Calltree) and debt collection (Altur) to healthcare (careCycle), logistics (Lanesurf), and even Photoshop rebuilt with voice (awen).
OpenAI dropped data on how people use ChatGPT, and every bar is likely a billion-dollar wedge if you verticalize it (10% of the world’s adult population log into it every week, 700M people). Tutoring (10%), how-to advice (9%), personal writing + editing (18%), health + fitness (6%) etc. Check-out their new “Grove Program” for builders.
A great deep-dive into today’s top 50 ai agents by Palle Broe shows incredible growth curves. >$10B poured into these and a combined valuation of >$67B. 10 of them well over 100M in ARR including some of my favorites like Midjourney, Elevenlabs and Replit. Lets not get into revenue multiples (or ai M&A economics) because some of you might faint, but you should revisit this.
Olivia Moore (a16z) tested a bunch of ai agents around “The AI Office Suite”. Two camps: generalists like Manus or Comet (fast, flexible) vs specialists like Gamma. Attio (AI CRM for GTM teams) shows a third path: broad systems of record that go deep with AI on key workflows (Startup Riders partner, test Pro for free here).
Brex released an analysis on how startups Vs enterprise are adopting AI. OpenAI dominates the Enterprise while Anthropic leading startups. BUT Anthropic grew super fast in the Enterprise over Q3-25.
Most AI founders I meet rightly obsess about scaling (but sometimes too early). Bob McGrew (ex-OpenAI) had a great pod at YC on the forward-deployed engineer model. Basically back to “do things that don’t scale” updated for the AI agent era.
I dropped my personal AI tools tier list for 2025 in the startup riders’ chat, would love to hear what’s on yours (will do deep dives). I stack the usual suspects vs one of our latest investments - Altan.ai, especially useful for voice AI use-cases. P.s. I’m working on shipping a voice product soon.
Logistics is turning into one of the best testing grounds for agentic AI. HappyRobot just raised $44M to show why. I’m stoked to be an investor and proud to see Spaniards crushing it in Silicon Valley. DM me if you’re working on a logistics use-case that could use their help.
Still wondering when and if OpenAI will do more with their GPT Store. I’ve built a few in the past and keep telling people these are underrated. Startup Pitch Deck has >25K+ conversations on the Store which I’m excited about. Also built Macro Counter and Chief Revenue Officer in the past. My friend Luisen launched a Sales GPT.
There’s a big wave coming in AI around compressing model size, making models cheaper, greener, and small enough to run on devices without losing quality. HP just wrote about why they’re betting on it, including Multiverse (one of our portfolio companies) that’s pushing the frontier here (from the basque country).
a16z released a great pod with Balaji (Coinbase co-founder) on the rise of “founding creators”. I loved the frame on “The founding engineer is the how. The founding creator is the why”, especially since I’ve been having a bunch of conversations with AI founders all struggling with their launch day (fomo is real). I’m also going to SF October 6/7 for a creator dinner + Speedrun event (thanks Ryan K. Rigney + shoutout to Ruben Dominguez and Guillermo Flor). Say hello if you are in SF that week 👋!
🌊 Venture capital
I dug into ICONIQ’s State of AI + Software 2025. Shows how fast the landscape is moving: $370B invested already this year, AI-native startups reaching $100M ARR in <2 years with <20 employees, and 80% of enterprises embedding AI into workflows.
It takes about 5 funding rounds on average to build a unicorn. Only ~200 do it in 2 or fewer rounds (WhatsApp, Anthropic), while others like Stripe and OpenAI reach unicorn status after 7+ rounds.
Carta data shows seed dilution is down, median 19.5% at Seed, 18% at Series A, 15% at B, 10% at C, with <10% of seed deals selling 30%+. They also dropped a 50-slide “Foundational Equity” deck (45k startups) covering cofounder splits, advisor equity, option pools, SAFE terms, and AI vs non-AI valuations.
Multi-stage VCs are flooding seed rounds. In 2025 they’ve done 70% more deals than boutique funds (258 vs 151), and just four multi-stage firms closed more seed rounds (152) than all boutique/seed funds combined. Many of the “top seed” names don’t even show up on the list.
🌊 Research Reports
CB Insights – AI Agent Tech Stack Breakdown
Menlo Ventures – State of Consumer AI 2025
PitchBook – 2025 Mid-Year US VC Outlook
Harvard – Critical & Emerging Tech Index
a16z – Top 100 GenAI Consumer Apps
Dealroom – Power Law Investors 2025
AngelList – State of Early-Stage 2025
CB Insights – Q2’25 AI Trends Report
Stanford – 2025 AI Index Report (HAI)
PitchBook – IPO Standards Q3 2025
a16z – AI x Commerce Deep Dive
Carta – Private Markets Q2 2025
Bessemer – State of AI 2025
HubSpot – AI in GTM Report
Sifted - AI Agents 2025
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🔒 Agentic Revolution — Deep dive into the next tech platform shift.
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That’s it! I’d love to hear from you, just reply to this email (I reply to all of them) 👋.
Brilliant Round Up - Resposted with a commentary because my audience will love it - thanks for publishing ✨
An excellent resource - thank you for wrangling it all together!