AI captured close to half of all global startup funding in 2025 — $202.3 billion, a jump of more than 75% year over year. Mega-rounds of $100 million or more made up 79% of that total, a sign the market has moved past early experimentation into a phase where proven teams with real business models command serious capital. Business communication is one of the categories benefiting most.
Who’s raising the biggest rounds
- LeapXpert — secured $180 million in growth funding to scale AI-powered, governed communications for financial services and government clients.
- Gong — backed by Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, and Sequoia, serves over 4,000 enterprise customers and processes hundreds of millions of customer interactions a year.
- Apollo — passed $100 million in ARR and 1 million registered users in 2025, with a free tier generous enough that many sales teams use it as their primary prospecting tool.
- Taktile — closed a $110 million Series C, bringing total funding to $184 million since 2020.
- ElevenLabs — compressed roughly $800 million of fundraising into 37 months across five rounds, from a $2 million pre-seed in January 2023 to $791 million total by February 2026.
The bigger trend
Among conversational and business-communication AI startups whose most recent round landed in 2025 or 2026, the median round size now exceeds $100 million — roughly triple the median for companies that last raised before 2024. That’s rapid round-size inflation, and it signals investors are consolidating around a smaller number of category leaders rather than spreading bets across many early-stage players.
