Despite the numerous discussions about San Francisco’s supposed fall, statistics consistently indicate that the Bay Area, including the city itself, persists as the premier location for venture-supported startups.

Enterprises situated in the Bay Area absorbed $90 billion in VC capital during 2024, amounting to 57% of the $178 billion the US venture industry allocated the previous year, according to freshly issued data by Crunchbase on Tuesday.

In 2024, OpenAI, located in San Francisco, was unmistakably the central hub, both in fostering a surrounding AI startup sector alongside its own well-funded startup arm, and in the venture capital it garnered for itself. However, additional notable entities include San Francisco’s Databricks with its groundbreaking $10 billion in acquisition; Elon Musk’s xAI, which secured $12 billion across a couple of funding rounds the prior year and quickly transitioned into OpenAI’s former headquarters in the San Francisco Mission District; Mountain View’s Waymo with its $5.6 billion Series C; San Francisco’s Anthropic, which amassed over $8 billion throughout 2024; and significant fundraising in 2024 from San Francisco’s Scale AI and Perplexity.

As we previously documented, this scenario is not merely serendipitous. It arises from the region’s supremacy in AI, the most substantial tech trend of 2024, in addition to being the backdrop for Big Tech (Google, Nvidia, Salesforce, etc.) and possessing a robust startup ecosystem — from Y Combinator to the venture capital hub of Sand Hill Road.

This self-sustaining loop presents no signs of waning in 2025, partly due to the Bay Area’s continued provision of the densest gathering of adept tech professionals. According to SignalFire statistics, approximately 49% of all Big Tech engineers (often tomorrow’s startup visionaries) and 27% of startup developers reside in the region.

With such a substantial concentration of everyone from investors to coders, forming the connections necessary to launch a startup becomes significantly simpler, assert entrepreneurs who moved to San Francisco in 2024. “We perceive the talent base as superior. The clientele base is also superior,” Anh-Tho Chuong, co-founder and CEO of open source billing platform Lago, previously mentioned to TechCrunch.

Correction: This article was revised to clarify that the total funding was exclusive to the US, not worldwide.