AI’s Lead Over Crypto for VC Dollars Increased in Q1’25, But Does This Race Really Matter?

Crypto enterprise funding in 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, based on information supplied by Pitchbook, displaying how buyers proceed to point out desire to AI.

Data exhibits that buyers closed 795 offers in the U.S in AI from January to March, with blockbuster offers like Databricks’ $15.3 billion spherical and Anthropic’s $2 billion increase dominating headlines.

Crypto’s largest blockbuster deal, in comparability, was Abu Dhabi’s MGX, with a $2 billion funding into Binance – the primary institutional placement in the crypto change. Other offers of notice embrace a $82 million increase 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 exhibits that AI startups attracted one-third of world VC funding in 2024, totaling $131.5 billion, with almost 1 / 4 of latest startups being an AI firm throughout 4,318 VC offers, in comparison with crypto’s $4.9 billion throughout simply 706 offers.

Analysis: Has AI stolen crypto’s enterprise {dollars}?

Blockbuster rounds from VCs in the AI house and headline-grabbing antics, similar to OpenAI’s Sam Altman in search of trillions, and AI’s rise from technological novelty to family identify due to transformer fashions, would make one suppose that there is all of the sudden an investor desire for one over the opposite.

Historically, all information exhibits that VCs have usually favored AI over crypto, with AI and machine studying attracting constant funding that is expanded exponentially, based on Statista information, rising from $670 million in 2011 to $36 billion in 2020 and solely upwards from there.

There’s solely been one 12 months the place crypto beat AI for funding, which was 2021 when VCs poured $30 billion into the market in comparison with ABI Research‘s $22.3 billion AI estimate for the 12 months.

Keep in thoughts that each one of this ignores crypto-native quirks like airdrops, which put contemporary capital in the arms of customers and, in flip, pump the token worth, inflating the dimensions of tasks’ treasuries.

A current report from Dragonfly discovered that between 2020 and 2024, the 11 largest airdrops generated $7 billion. This will not shut the hole between AI and crypto, nevertheless it exhibits that there are extra methods to get a greenback than conventional enterprise capital.