#ai-funding

#ai-funding

Subscriber momentum accelerated meaningfully to start the year, with January and February on track to be the largest months for new subscribers in our history. People use ChatGPT to learn, write, plan, and build. As usage scales, the product improves in ways people feel immediately: faster responses, higher reliability, stronger safety, and more consistent performance.

The markets are sinking across the board as traders and investors run for the exits on technology and inflation-related fears. All three of the major stock market averages are suffering steep declines, including a 1% drop in the Nasdaq Composite alongside a nearly 2% decline in the Russell 2000 index comprised of small-cap names.

During the AI Impact Summit in India, the UK government announced that £27m is now available for AI alignment research, backing some 60 projects. The project combines grant funding for research, access to compute infrastructure and ongoing academic mentorship from AISI's own leading scientists in the field to drive progress in alignment research. Without continued progress in this area, increasingly powerful AI models could act in ways that are difficult to anticipate or control, which could pose challenges for global safety and governance.

L ast September, nearly 6,500 people-including start-up founders, investors, and researchers-gathered at the Palais des congrès in Montreal for All In, Canada's largest artificial intelligence event. After passing through a security checkpoint, they lounged on plush furniture and posed in front of a luminous "ALL IN" sign. Everyone wore a lanyard with a QR code that could be scanned to connect through an app, a sort of modern-day business card. Kiosks showcased AI companies; smooth jazz flowed and so did coffee.

Money was no object for the AI industry in early 2025. A vibe check crept in the second half of the year. OpenAI raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation. Safe Superintelligence and Thinking Machine Labs raised individual $2 billion seed rounds before shipping a single product. Even first-time founders were raising at a scale that once belonged only to Big Tech.

Meta's chief artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun, is in early discussions to raise €500mn for a new artificial intelligence start-up, a move that would value the yet-to-launch company at roughly €3bn, according to people familiar with the matter. The venture, called Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs (AMI Labs), is expected to be formally announced in January. LeCun, a Turing Award winner and one of the pioneers of modern AI, will serve as executive chair.

The markets are attempting gains this morning with all three of the major stock market averages seeing green out of the gate. Investors and traders have been battling some weak economic data, not least a skyrocketing unemployment rate, that has dampened sentiment in the final stretch of 2025. If they can hold onto today's gains, not only would it break the Nasdaq Composite's multi-day losing streak but momentum could shift in time for the year-end performance tally, which currently stands up 19.3% year-to-date.

Anthropic has closed a deal to raise $13 billion from investors in a new funding round that nearly triples its valuation to $183 billion, including dollars raised a larger-than-expected haul that makes the artificial intelligence company one of the most valuable startups in the world. The financing, one of the largest to date for an AI company, was led by investment firm Iconiq Capital alongside co-leads Fidelity Management and Research Co. and Lightspeed Venture Partners.