Seed investing is headed for its best year since 2021, when venture capital investing in the earliest stage of start-ups was at record levels.

And 2025 is shaping up to be the biggest year for large seeding deals. Investors have backed nearly 700 seed-stage rounds of $10 million or more this year, putting this group on track to hit an all-time high, according to a recent Crunchbase report.

What’s more, 2025 is setting the record for even larger seed rounds — defined as financings of $100 million or more. The value of deals hit $10 billion, dwarfing that of previous years, the report notes.

“The concept of a seed round being very small is rather retro,” Crunchbase says. “Today both eight- and nine-figure rounds are reasonably common, especially for a start-up with highly regarded founders, expertise in a hot sector, and an early technological advantage.”

One-fifth of the $10 billion is attributed to a single deal. Earlier this year, Thinking Machines Lab raised $2 billion in its seed round, led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Nvidia, Accel, ServiceNow, Cisco, AMD, Jane Street, and others, according to announcements. The value of the company, founded less than a year earlier by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is $12 billion, based on the latest financing. 

TexAu.com notes that Thinking Machines is building advanced artificial intelligence systems and that the historic seed financing highlights enormous investor confidence in next-generation AI labs.

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More recently, Unconventional AI raised $475 million in its seed round, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Lux Capital and DCVC. The company is designing computers to optimize energy efficiency for AI, Crunchbase says. The deal valued the company at $4.5 billion.

“Seed investors poured money into AI start-ups at a more exuberant pace than even last year, which was already record-setting,” according to Crunchbase. Slightly more than $15 billion has gone to AI-focused seed rounds this year, up about 50 percent from last year, the data firm says. So far this year, more than 42 percent of all global seed funding has gone to companies in AI-focused industry categories, up from 30 percent in 2024.

“Overall, we can point to 2025 as a robust year for seed spending, but also a period of heightened consolidation among perceived early winners,” Crunchbase explains. “Given that venture returns are driven largely by a handful of huge winning bets, it’s not shocking to see investors clustering around the few upstarts that seem best poised to deliver those. Still, it’s a bit disruptive to the classic idea of the seed round as a small wager on a promising founding team.”

Here is a list of the most active venture capital firms in the seeding category, created by Crunchbase for Institutional Investor.

Chart Source: Crunchbase