🟢 US Investors are still all in on AI, placing their bets on the full stack

Philippe MEDA

29 Apr 2025 — 4 min read

TechCrunch recently listed all nineteen $100M+ AI startup rounds so far in 2025.

While heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic raised multi-billion-dollar rounds, many emerging players in healthcare, defense, legal tech, and creative tools also secured major funding. Beyond the usual top-tier VCs (Lightspeed, General Catalyst, Sequoia), investment was notably driven by tech giants such as Nvidia and Microsoft.

Where we see real maturity in this game in the US playfield is that these rounds of investments are "full stack", evenly distributed across all the digital layers from the "Rails" to "Data."

Controlling the current (or next) digital ecosystem is always about exerting control in a dual push: control the activity and control the infrastructure. (Fifty shades of digital, 2023)

But mostly, the big dollars war is on locking in the next infrastructure winner. Control the rails and the OS, and you control everything else that needs to run on something:

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Greed will end up solving climate change

From social media to social credit: the creeping convergence of U.S. and Chinese citizen profiling

China's guerrilla warfare on tariffs starts with luxury goods

How many times can you say 'mistake' to your board?