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| 10 of the biggest winners from 2025's AI boom |
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| (Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images) |
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By Rosie Bradbury and Jacob Robbins, PitchBook News
2025 was undoubtedly the year of AI—and some folks benefitted more than the rest.
Here's our rundown of the biggest winners of the 2025 AI boom.
1. High-capacity data storage vendors
If Nvidia is selling picks and shovels in the AI gold rush, then these vendors are selling the wooden handles needed to produce them.
Three high-capacity data storage providers—Western Digital, Seagate Technology and Micron Technology—were all among the top five S&P 500 stocks with the biggest gains, year-to-date. The anticipated demand for advanced memory and storage from GPU giants has driven up the stock prices of these companies across the board.
2. "Acqui-hired" talent
Elite AI experts have never been more in demand, and this year's slew of AI "acqui-hires" confirms it. Meta made headlines in June for buying a 49% stake in Scale AI for $14.8 billion and scooping up a team of its top talent, including CEO Alexandr Wang. Meanwhile, Google announced in July it was poaching Cognition CEO Varun Mohan for $2.4 billion in licensing fees and compensation. The deals were similarly structured to avoid antitrust scrutiny.
3. Mira Murati & Thinking Machines
After leaving OpenAI in late 2024, ex- CTO Mira Murati joined forces with former colleagues, including Barret Zoph and John Schulman, to build a new foundational AI company, Thinking Machines.
In July, Murati announced that Thinking Machines had raised at a $12 billion valuation in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. By November, it was already eyeing a valuation of $50 billion or more, per Bloomberg.
4. Vibe coding
And AI coding agents in particular have captured outsized VC attention this year. Anysphere increased its valuation more than tenfold from January to November.
Replit's annualized recurring revenue went from $10 million at the end of 2024 to $150 million ARR in September. Lovable said that in October its annualized revenue had reached $200 million.
Whether these companies can sustain this explosive revenue growth will be something to watch in 2026.
5. Palantir
Palantir's stock price went up by 135%, year-to-date, thanks to retail investor enthusiasm for defense tech and AI.
Despite only joining the S&P 500 in September 2024, Palantir's price-to-earnings ratio TTM has already reached the 400s, an extraordinary figure for a publicly traded company.
6. Google
Google's release of its Gemini 3 model and its notable capabilities and pace of progress sent OpenAI's staff into a so-called "code red." Gemini 3 surpassed OpenAI's GPT-5 on multiple benchmarks across software engineering, scientific knowledge and mathematics problem-solving.
Alphabet stock is up 68% year-to-date, and revenue from Google Cloud, one of its fastest-growing segments, grew 34% in Q3.
7. Neocloud startups
Crusoe and Lambda, two of the leading neocloud startups selling high-performance compute capacity, are riding high amid the ongoing data center buildout. Lambda's stock price on secondary marketplace Forge Global has jumped 80% in the last year, while Crusoe arranged an employee stock sale last month at a $13 billion valuation, up from a valuation of $2.8 billion just one year ago.
8. The San Francisco real estate market
Bustling AI activity, coupled with return-to-office mandates and newly cash-rich employees thanks to a spate of tender offers, has driven up real estate prices and demand.
The rolling three-month median house sale price in San Francisco is up 9% year-over-year and trending to its highest level since 2022, according to real estate company Compass.
9. Legal tech
VC investment value in legal tech this year doubled from 2024.
Harvey raised three rounds of funding this year alone: a $300 million Series D in February, $300 million for a Series E in June, and a $160 million Series F in early December.
Meanwhile, Legora raised $230 million across two rounds, while Eve, which makes AI for personal injury law, collected $150 million.
10. Humanoid robots
2025 has been a blockbuster year for robotics startups capitalizing on the AI boom.
Figure AI, a startup developing humanoid robots, raised over $1 billion for its Series C, and Time Magazine featured its O3 robot on its list of best inventions of 2025. Apptronik, has raised over $700 million and was valued at $5 billion in November. |
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Best of PitchBook News from our VC team
• After a false start in the spring, US IPOs of venture-backed companies made a significant comeback in Q3. And they brought some liquidity with them. Full story
• VC-backed startups are racing to build AI data centers—and leveraging their GPU stockpiles as loan collateral to do it. But this adds new risk. Read more
• The Trump administration’s new $100,000 fee on first-time H-1B petitions has thrown a major wrench into Silicon Valley’s hiring, albeit with uneven impact. Complete report
• Sub-$5 million VC rounds are disappearing. A decade ago, these deals made up over 70% of all US VC transactions. Today it’s less than half of that. Read more
• The saying that "VC is a relationship game" now has data to prove it. Companies with well-connected lead investors have failure rates at least 10 percentage points lower than those of peers backed by peripheral investors. Full story |
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Some of the best PitchBook VC research of 2025:
• Seed valuations have soared, but are investors paying for quality or paying into the hype? Download the analyst report
• The US venture secondary market is accelerating fast, reaching an estimated $94.9 billion in annual value across direct company stakes and continuation funds. Read the Q3 2025 US VC Secondary Market Watch
• Figma’s successful IPO served as a strong indicator of public investor sentiment toward high-growth VC-backed companies. However, uncertainty has kept a cap on companies rushing to begin the process. Get the analyst note
• Our AUM forecast projects North American VC AUM to grow from $1.36 trillion in 2024 to $1.81 trillion by 2029—a modest 38% increase, following years of post-2021 stagnation. Read the details
• Startups are making acquisition offers that five years ago were considered only corporates’ domain. Read our analyst’s take |
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AI deals have come to dominate the entire venture capital market at an unprecedented clip, dwarfing the quick concentration of investments during prior hype cycles such as crypto and mobility tech. By the third quarter of 2024, AI deals accounted for 40.3% of VC dollars invested during the prior 12 months. A year later, it has rocketed to a record 63.3%, according to PitchBook’s Q3 2025 Quantitative Perspectives: A Fork in the Road.
In comparison, fintech investments made up 17.1% of TTM deal value at their 2022 peak, while crypto only captured 6.9% at its highest, also in 2022. Even mobility tech, with all the enthusiasm around self-driving cars and scooters, only reached a peak of 15.1% in Q1 2017. |
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| The Daily Benchmark: 2018 Vintage Global Debt Funds |
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