Four AI giants raised $188 billion（約30兆円） in Q1 2026, concentrating 60% of all venture capital, but early-stage AI companies are still growing faster than ever—if they can build defensible moats.

What happened: OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo together raised $188 billion（約30兆円） in Q1 2026, accounting for 60% of the $300 billion（約48兆円） in total venture capital deployed that quarter. Investment in the US rose 190% year-over-year, but the number of deals fell 26%, meaning money is flowing into larger rounds rather than spreading across more companies.

Why it matters: The remaining $112 billion（約18兆円） of funding sits in line with recent quarterly highs, and pre-Seed to Series A companies are growing faster than ever—top AI-native companies are scaling from $1 million（約1.6億円） to $30 million（約48億円） in annual recurring revenue five times faster than previous software generations. However, the bar to raise has roughly doubled in five years, and the companies getting funded look nothing like they did three years ago. Startups without meaningful moats—brand, switching costs, or economies of scale—face pressure from both larger platform owners above them and falling prices below them.

What to watch: Investors are gravitating toward sectors like robotics, defence, photonics, biotech, and novel compute because these require integration with the physical world, scientific expertise, manufacturing know-how, or proprietary data—assets that foundation model providers cannot easily replicate. For founders, the strategic question is whether their business becomes stronger or weaker as models improve, and what assets they control that would remain valuable if intelligence itself became abundant and cheap.