The five most-valuable technology companies have plenty of money to invest in startups. They’re in a particularly strong position today, with shares of each up sharply last year.
Even so, for the most part, the “Big Five” (Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon and Alphabet) did not go on a venture investment binge in 2024.
Altogether, the five companies invested in 149 known startup financings of $1 million or more last year. 1 That’s up a bit from 2023, but still the second-lowest total of the past five years, as charted below.
Big helping of AI
While they weren’t especially prolific dealmakers in 2024, tech giants did partake in some very large funding rounds, mostly for artificial intelligence companies.
Of those, the biggest was OpenAI’s $6.6 billion October financing, which was led by Thrive Capital but also included Microsoft and Nvidia.
Alphabet led the next-largest — a $5.6 billion round for its autonomous driving spin-off Waymo, After that came Amazon, which made a $4 billion November investment in Anthropic.
Although these are big rounds, they are all still much smaller than the headline deal of 2023: Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI.
By deal count, Alphabet leads, Apple lags
Among the Big Five, Google and its holding company Alphabet were by far the most active venture investors last year, with 87 known rounds. Besides Waymo, the company and its affiliated venture firms’ largest lead rounds were for digital bank Monzo and data management platform Cribl.
The least active investor was Apple, which participated in no disclosed rounds in 2024. The other three — Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon — were somewhere in the middle, as charted below.
Looking up for 2025
As we embark on a new year, we’re not seeing obvious indicators for a startup investment pullback by the Big Five.
To the contrary, there are a lot of positive signals, including flush cash reserves and historically strong stock prices at the most highly valued tech companies. Plus, pressure continues for today’s tech industry leaders to remain at the forefront of AI innovation.
But of course, just because tech giants can invest in startups doesn’t mean they will. Just look at Apple, whose reluctance to take part in the startup funding scene has nothing to do with its ability to write big checks.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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