AI startups raised over $407 billion in VC funding in the first half of 2026—blowing past the $264 billion invested in the sector in all of 2025, according to PitchBook’s Q2 2026 AI Report. But only two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic, collected more than half of the H1 tally, about $217 billion combined.

“The concentration of capital into frontier models shows the conviction investors have in OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s ability to not just scale their own platforms but the vertical applications built on top of them,” said Dimitri Zabelin, the PitchBook senior analyst who authored the report. “It is still an extraordinary amount of capital.”

Moreover, these two AI behemoths achieved this with just three funding rounds: OpenAI’s historic $122 billion round in March and Anthropic’s $65 billion Series H and $30 billion Series G in May and February, respectively.

Everyone else is splitting the remainder.

Notably, vertical application companies (startups building services and products on top of the frontier models) drove 62.9% of H1 AI deal count, but only captured 12.9% of all the capital. The horizontal platform companies, which include World Labs and ElevenLabs, alongside the frontier AI model labs, accounted for 70.8% of the deal value at $288.1 billion.

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VC’s concentration in AI startups is taking hold across the market. The first half of 2026 saw only 3,500 deals for such companies, down from 8,290 in all of 2025.

But the thinning of the deal count has more to do with the global macroeconomic backdrop than any cooling of AI enthusiasm, Zabelin said. Inflation stemming from the war in Iran has pushed the US Federal Reserve to scale back its rate-cut plans, which in turn has tightened credit and made investors more selective in their bets.

Those forces are also reshaping the exit calculus for the two frontier labs at the center of it all. Most notably, OpenAI is reportedly weighing a delay of its IPO to 2027, amid media reports that the company isn’t meeting internal benchmarks and concerns about global market volatility.

For now, Zabelin expects capital concentration, not scarcity, to remain the defining trend of the AI market through the rest of 2026.

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/half-ais-record-407b-went-213446785.html