Today’s AI funding rush reminds me of the fintech investing hype of 2021

It turns out that the massive $642 million round that U.S.-based GPU compute provider CoreWeave just closed was a secondary transaction. I can’t summon a better news event to summarize the current state of investor interest, venture included, in AI-related startups.

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The ongoing frenzy to invest in AI startups is not a local phenomenon: German AI company Aleph Alpha closed a $500 million Series B in November, and France’s Mistral AI is currently tipped to be closing in on €450 million at a €2 billion valuation, after raising a $113 million seed round earlier this year. Then we have OpenAI’s in-process secondary transaction that could go through at a valuation of nearly $90 billion.

The list doesn’t get any less hotter if we include recent eight-figure investments instead of those worth nine figures or more.

Parsing a list of recent AI funding events put together by Crunchbase, we can find more stand-out companies: Rohirrim (generative AI for enterprise) just raised $15 million; Atomic Industries (AI tuned for industrial production) raised $17 million; and Assembly AI (AI speech models) closed a $50 million round.

Those are all from December. And today happens to be December 5.