Don’t bet against California.
For the past six decades, any tech investor would have been wise to take that advice. From semiconductors to personal computing to online search to AI, the leading companies of successive technology eras have originated in or around Silicon Valley.
Such density may be a boon, as it allows talent and genius to congregate in a particular place, helping ideas to cross-pollinate and ambitious new ventures to form, all within easy access to capital.
Or it may be a burden, concentrating vast wealth in a small geography, pushing up living costs and contributing to housing shortages and traffic woes. Other locales, meanwhile, miss out on the jobs and investment that come with being home to longstanding and emerging tech giants.
But however one might weigh the positives and negatives of tech investment concentration, the numbers speak for themselves: Startup investors love California companies, and the amount of capital consolidating in the Golden State is only growing.
So far, 2025 is proving out this thesis. In the first half of this year, roughly 68% of all U.S. startup funding went to California-headquartered companies, per Crunchbase data.
That’s a historically high level, as charted below, with California companies averaging closer to half of total funding in other recent years.
In dollar terms, California’s 2025 haul is also enormous, penciling out to around $94.5 billion. That’s even higher than statewide funding for the first half of 2021, when startup investment was hitting record highs.
OpenAI: Exception or exemplar?
Of course, this year had one enormous, unprecedented single round that really tilted the investment totals California’s way. By this, we’re talking about SoftBank’s $40 billion investment in OpenAI, announced at the end of March.
The deal stands out as the largest startup funding round in history, 4x larger than any previous one. It also accounts for more than 40% of total California startup funding for this year.
Given this round’s hugeness, it’s tempting to write off California’s funding surge this year as an anomaly, a fluke of a deal amid a feverish period for investment in formative artificial intelligence companies.
But history tells us that such a take might be misguided. After all, is it an anomaly that the two most valuable public companies today — Apple and Nvidia — are Silicon Valley-based? Is it a fluke that all five of the most valuable U.S. unicorns — SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, Databricks and Anthropic — are California companies?
If so, it’s an anomaly that seems to recur with great frequency: Ambitious California startups growing into extraordinarily influential and valuable companies.
Other top California funding rounds
Besides OpenAI, several other California companies also scored multibillion-dollar venture funding rounds this year. Top names include:
Overall, large investment recipients are an AI-centric cohort. This isn’t surprising given that Northern California is far-and-away the leading hub for startup funding in the space.
The next chapter
We’re still in the early chapters of the rise of generative AI and autonomous agents. So, it’s probably a tad early to speculate on the next wave of technological progress likely to attract record-setting sums of venture investment.
However, looking at past history, one bet seems fairly secure: Whatever the future may bring, it’ll likely involve technologies developed and scaled in California.
Related Crunchbase query:
Related reading:
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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