Q1’25 Venture Pulse Report – Global trends

VC investment in the Americas surged in Q1 2025, driven by a series of mega-deals, while Europe saw more muted growth and Asia experienced another quarterly decline, reaching record low investment levels. Deal volume dropped across all regions, as investors remained cautious amid macroeconomic uncertainty.

The U.S. retained its position as the top destination for VC funding, bolstered by several high-profile raises, including OpenAI’s $40 billion round, Anthropic’s $3.5 billion, and Infinite Reality’s $3 billion raise in the augmented reality space. Europe ranked second in total VC investment, led by Binance’s $2 billion raise — the region’s largest of the quarter — followed by German proptech firm Reneo, which secured $624 million. Asia’s VC market remained soft, with just three deals exceeding $500 million. Singapore-based datacentre firm DayOne led with a $1.2 billion raise, followed by China’s cleantech company SE Environmental ($688 million) and India-based e-commerce platform Meesho ($550 million).

AI plays continued to dominate the VC market in Q1’25. Wile the largest deals in the AI sector occurred in the US led by OpenAI, Anthropic and Infinite Reality, other regions also saw robust AI investments. In Europe, AI-enabled industry solutions companies raised a number of $100 million funding rounds, including Sweden-based preventative health tech company Neko Health ($260 million) and UK-based AI-powered video communications company Synthesia ($180 million). Asia also saw a number of significant AI-focused raises, including China-based Neolix Technologies ($137 million) and Univista ($137 million), Australia-based Harrison.ai ($111 million), Hong Kong based InSilico Medicine ($100 million, and India-based Spotdraft ($54 million).

Looking at the AI space more broadly, the launch of China-based DeepSeek’s R1 AI model sent ripples across the globe in Q1’25; DeepSeek’s launch was followed closely by new AI models by Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba. The launch of the three models so close together—all purporting to be more energy efficient than others built to date—highlights the intense competition globally and regionally for market dominance in the LLM space.

As competition heated up in the AI space worldwide, a number of governments made substantive moves in order to promote, encourage, and accelerate AI development. During the quarter, the US announced The Stargate Project, which aims to spend $500 billion on developing next gen AI infrastructure in the US.¹ This was followed by the European Commission’s announcement of its InvestAI program² —a plan to drive $206 billion into AI innovation, including the development of gigafactories—and France’s announcement of $112 billion in AI investment commitments.³ During the quarter, China also announced a $138 billion national venture capital guidance fund to invest in a range of priority sectors, including AI and quantum computing.⁴