Sector Snapshot: Sales And Marketing Gets An AI Makeover

In 2025, the Bay Area expanded its dominance of U.S. seed funding — capturing a growing share of both deals and dollars — even as most startups remained geographically dispersed, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows, resulting in a more bifurcated landscape.

Venture funding of AI companies in 2026 will easily smash funding records set in 2025, with some heavy deals already consummated in the first quarter, according to market researchers. Data from Crunchbase shows that $300 billion poured into 6,000 startups worldwide during the first quarter of 2026. That’s a quarterly record for venture funding in AI companies, a Crunchbase news report said. A study from S&P Global measured generative AI funding reaching over $140 billion in the first quarter of 2026, outpacing all of 2025, according to a story published on the company’s website. Amid economic concerns, inflation, and the war in Iran, there were fewer deals overall, but the funding rounds were large in scope compared to any made in 2025. X.AI, for example, kicked off 2026 with a series-E round of $20 billion. OpenAI received $122 billion in a massive funding round in March, with a valuation of $852 billion. Anthropic received $30 billion in one round of funding that valued the company a

More than half of seed dollars last year went into deals of $10 million or above. At the same time, deal counts for seed-stage startups have fallen since the 2021-2022 peak, as has funding going into rounds below $10 million, Crunchbase data shows.

A simulation of how a single forecast change moves through five planning teams, and why most retailers lose money in the gap between Sales and Stores. The post How Spreadsheets Quietly Cost Supply Chains Millions appeared first on Towards Data Science.

Every marketing and AI leader is being asked to do the same thing right now: scale AI across teams, accelerate adoption, and show measurable results.

A total of 37 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in March, the highest monthly count in close to four years, Crunchbase data shows. The robotics sector led unicorn creation last month, with six new billion-dollar startups.

This past quarter, funding to security- and privacy-focused startups dipped slightly on a sequential basis, but remained well above year-ago levels. Overall, investors put $4.9 billion into global companies in the space in Q1, per Crunchbase data, a comparatively solid performance relative to recent quarters.

In the first quarter of 2026, a handful of large, well-funded AI companies, almost all based in the U.S., captured the vast majority of venture dollars, even as global startup deal count fell, Crunchbase data shows.