Artificial intelligence companies are seeing their price tags shoot through the roof as investment firms scramble not to miss the next breakthrough technology, according to Orlando Bravo.
Orlando Bravo, a top private equity leader who started the private equity firm Thoma Bravo, says venture capital companies are jumping into anything related to AI without much hesitation. Speaking to Bloomberg TV on Thursday during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Bravo pointed out how desperate these firms are to grab a piece of AI companies while they can still get in early.
“Venture firms are just piling into any AI story they can,” Bravo explained. He went on to say the “FOMO of being in any AI deal as early as you can in the private markets is pretty remarkable.”
AI will shake up less than half of software firms
According to Bravo, major software companies have dropped about 30% in value compared to last year, and the multiples investors pay for their free cash flow have fallen sharply.
Bravo thinks AI technology will shake up less than half of all software companies, but many will still feel the effects. “AI will disrupt a percentage of software companies, less than half, is what we think, but it’ll be disruptive to many of them,” he noted. Companies that focus mainly on technical work face the biggest threat from AI tools that can do similar tasks.
Despite these concerns, Bravo made clear his company sees AI as a major force for change. Thoma Bravo is putting serious money behind AI from a business software perspective, he said, calling it “transformational” for the industry.
Last year, Bravo had warned that AI was creating serious worry among people who invest money for a living. Investment firms are having trouble figuring out which AI companies are actually worth the risk and which ones are just riding the hype wave.
The investment frenzy is showing up in some eye-popping deals
Anthropic, an AI company, just signed papers for a $10 billion funding round that would put its total value at $350 billion this month, as reported by Cryptopolitan. Investment firms Coatue and Singapore’s GIC are leading this round.
That price tag is almost double what Anthropic was worth just four months earlier. Back in September 2025, the company had a valuation of $183 billion. Now it’s nearly twice that amount in a remarkably short time.
Even more unusual, Sequoia Capital is reportedly putting money into Anthropic even though it already backs OpenAI and xAI, two companies that compete directly with Anthropic. This breaks the old rule in venture capital about not investing in rivals at the same time.
The numbers from 2025 show just how much money was poured into AI. Global venture capital funding hit $425 billion for the year, jumping 30% from the year before, according to Crunchbase data. AI companies grabbed nearly half of all that money.
Five big AI companies each raised more than $5 billion in 2025, including OpenAI, Scale AI, Anthropic, and xAI. Together, these companies brought in $84 billion, which equals about 20% of every dollar that venture capitalists invested anywhere in the world last year.
OpenAI reached a $500 billion valuation, making it the most valuable private company ever recorded.
These massive numbers support what Bravo was saying about investors desperately trying to get into AI deals. With so much money chasing these companies, valuations keep climbing higher, even as questions remain about which businesses will actually succeed long-term.
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Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/ai-startups-command-sky-high-prices-as-investors-fomo-kicks-in/
