Global VC hit $512 billion in 2025, but analyst Alan Goldberg says the real shift is structural. BestBrokers data showing why the picks-and-shovels play is quietly outrunning AI model investment.
What’s happening: New data from investment research platform BestBrokers shows global venture capital investment reached $512.6 billion across all sectors in 2025, with AI attracting $270.2 billion, more than half the total.
Why this matters: The pattern signals a structural reordering of capital priorities, with traditional consumer-facing tech sectors continuing to lose ground as capital rotates towards platforms and tooling that underpin large-scale AI operations.
When Anthropic closed a US$30 billion Series G funding round on 12 February 2026, lifting its valuation to US$380 billion and marking the second-largest private venture deal in history behind only OpenAI’s 2025 raise, it crystallised something investors had been signalling for some time: the AI capital cycle is not slowing down, it is deepening.
New research from BestBrokers, compiled using data from Pitchbook and CB Insights alongside financial disclosures from leading venture capital firms, puts that momentum in context. Global venture capital investment reached $512.6 billion across all sectors in 2025, with AI startups alone attracting $270.2 billion, or 52.7% of the total.
But the most dramatic acceleration was not in AI models. It was in the data infrastructure powering them.
BestBrokers data shows VC investment in Big Data companies surged 130.9% year-on-year, rising from $57.7 billion in 2024 to $133.2 billion in 2025, a growth rate that outpaced every other major tech vertical tracked in the research, including AI and machine learning itself, which grew 80.6% over the same period.
Zooming out to a five-year view, the reordering becomes sharper. Big Data funding has risen 281% since 2020, when it stood at $35 billion. AI and machine learning funding grew 235% over the same period, from $80.6 billion to $270.2 billion. Robotics and drones climbed 217%, from $9.9 billion in 2020 to $31.4 billion in 2025, with a 97.5% year-on-year jump in 2025 alone. Advanced manufacturing, benefiting from AI-enabled industrial automation, rose 124.7% year-on-year to $31.9 billion.
Alan Goldberg from BestBrokers said the momentum reflects something more deliberate than hype chasing. “The past five years show a decisive reordering of venture capital priorities away from consumer-facing operations and towards the infrastructure that makes large-scale AI commercially viable. Despite pure AI startups claiming an ever-growing part of VC funding, the strongest momentum has actually come from the data platforms, pipelines and tooling required to collect, process and operationalise ever-larger volumes of information, a crucial component for any AI model.”
The flip side of infrastructure’s rise is the continued retreat of capital from legacy and consumer-facing sectors. BestBrokers data shows that over the five-year period, telecommunications, media, and technology fell 69% in funding, mobility tech dropped 57%, and e-commerce declined 51%. In 2025 alone, mobility tech was down 44.2% year-on-year, e-commerce fell 26%, and TMT slid 17.5%.
Crypto and blockchain bucked the broader consumer-tech trend, recovering 67.5% year-on-year in 2025 to reach $19.6 billion, a 180% five-year rise the research attributes to renewed appetite for infrastructure and protocol-layer plays following the post-2021 contraction.
As Goldberg noted, “Traditional consumer and platform-driven verticals such as TMT, mobility, and e-commerce have seen sustained declines as investors rotate out of crowded, margin-constrained markets with weaker differentiation and slower paths to defensible scale.”
The BestBrokers data, taken alongside Anthropic’s record raise, points to a market that has moved beyond betting on which AI model wins to backing who controls the compute, data, and deployment rails beneath them.
Goldberg framed the longer arc directly: “This marks a structural shift in venture capital away from growth-at-all-costs consumer models and towards capital-heavy, infrastructure-led verticals where control of data, compute, and deployment is increasingly seen as the true source of long-term competitive advantage.”
For businesses operating within or adjacent to AI, the signal from global capital markets is consistent: the question is no longer whether AI is the dominant investment theme, but which layer of it you are building on.
Additional information on VC investments, major AI deals, and our complete research methodology can be found in the full report.
