Two AI vendors took 43% of all startup funding. Plan for it.

Global startups raised a record $510 billion in the first half of 2026 — and two companies took nearly half of it. OpenAI and Anthropic alone pulled in $217 billion, 43% of every venture dollar that moved in six months. If your business runs on AI tools, the money behind those tools just got extremely concentrated, and concentration has a way of showing up on your invoice.

What actually happened

Per Crunchbase, H1 2026 global venture funding hit $510 billion — more than all of 2025 combined. OpenAI and Anthropic accounted for $217 billion of that, 43% of all startup funding. Anthropic raised $65 billion in the second quarter alone and became the most valuable private company on Crunchbase's board.

The broader tilt is just as sharp: more than 70% of global startup capital in Q2 went to AI-focused companies, up from roughly 50% a year earlier. The venture market didn't just grow — it funneled. A record amount of money is chasing a shrinking number of names, and the names at the top are the two labs whose models sit underneath most of the AI software you're being sold.

Why it matters for your business

When two vendors raise nine figures a quarter, they aren't doing it to keep prices low for a print shop in Tempe. That capital comes with expectations — revenue, margin, pricing power — and those get passed down through API rates, seat pricing, and the "pro" tier that used to be free. We've watched this movie before with cloud and with SaaS: cheap while they're buying market share, then the meter climbs once you're wired in.

The concentration also means single points of failure. If the tool you built your workflow on is a thin wrapper over one lab's API, then that lab's pricing, rate limits, and terms are now your pricing, rate limits, and terms. A model deprecation or a policy change becomes your outage.

The operator move isn't to avoid these vendors — they make genuinely good models. It's to keep them swappable. Route your AI calls through a layer you control, so switching providers is a config change, not a rebuild. Keep your prompts, data, and business logic in your own systems. Treat any single model as a rented input, not the foundation. That way, when the pricing power the market just handed these two companies gets used, you can move — instead of paying whatever the meter says.

Sources: Crunchbase News.