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SeedPublished 2026-10-23

Venture capital in the AI boom

Venture capital is one of the fastest-growing keywords in the finance journals, and startups are a big topic in management and economics, but only 18 of these papers touch artificial intelligence. As more venture money goes to AI companies, are other startups crowded out, or does AI lower the cost of starting up?

financemanagemententrepreneurship

What prompted this

In the finance journals, "venture capital" had 13 papers in July–September 2026 against about 5 expected from its earlier share (see the finance dashboard). Since October 2025, 250 papers carry a venture-capital or startup keyword (106 in management journals, 80 in economics, 56 in finance). Only 18 of them also carry an AI keyword.

Questions

  • As AI deals take a growing share of venture funding, do non-AI startups raise less, later or at lower valuations?
  • Do AI tools let founders build more with less capital, so that seed rounds shrink while later rounds grow?
  • Do AI-heavy funds earn returns that differ from those of earlier waves such as the internet, mobile and clean tech?

Data that could help

Deal data from PitchBook, Crunchbase, Preqin or VentureXpert (the M&A and private capital category of the dataset ranking), with AI exposure classified from company descriptions.

Next step

Classify startups as AI or non-AI from their descriptions and compare round sizes and the time between rounds before and after 2023.

Related research activity

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
venture capital4#525197
startups10#121227
generative AI15#57701

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/venture-capital-in-the-ai-boom.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Venture capital in the AI boom. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/venture-capital-in-the-ai-boom

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-venture-capital-in-the-ai-boom,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Venture capital in the AI boom},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/venture-capital-in-the-ai-boom}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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