Tech:NYC Quarterly Snapshot
*Note that this first installment includes data from the previous six months (Q4 2024 through Q1 2025).
AI Ascendancy: New York Firms Land $1.5 B in Deals
New York City’s tech sector remains “remarkably vibrant,” underpinned by diversified funding sources, tech solutions, and an ever-evolving talent pool. Despite global headwinds and tighter capital markets, New York’s innovation flywheel continues to turn. Over the last four quarters, local firms raised $25.3 billion in venture capital. Although deal count slid from 468 in Q1 2024 to 305 in Q1 2025, quarterly capital peaked at $7.6 billion in early 2024, signaling investor confidence even amid fewer transactions. Crucially, New York is significantly narrowing the long‑standing deal‑flow gap with the Bay Area (441 NY‑Combined Statistical Area (CSA) deals vs. the Bay Area’s 65 in Q1 2025) as momentum builds in the AI, FinTech, and HealthTech verticals.
AI is New York’s standout growth engine. In Q1 2025, 71 % of all U.S. VC dollars flowed into AI, and NYC grabbed a meaningful share with 81 AI deals worth about $1.5 billion—far ahead of Los Angeles and Boston. Megadeals such as Hebbia’s $130 million Series B raise, Ramp’s $50 million raise, and Rogo’s $150 million secondary raise highlight a trend in the numbers of fewer, larger rounds. Alongside the $1.52 billion in private AI investment, New York State committed an additional $90 million in state backing for the Empire AI initiative, bringing the total funding for that project to more than $565 million. These public-private financings reinforce NYC’s emergence as a budding AI hub, even as investors raise the bar for non‑AI founders and tighten seed‑stage liquidity.
Talent metrics mirror the capital story. NYC led the nation with 12,853 tech job postings in March 2025—6,556 more than San Francisco—and 7,000 of those listings came through Tech:NYC’s jobboard. Within that total, 2,044 new AI roles pushed the city’s AI‑to‑IT job‑intensity to 38 %, while the stock of active AI positions reached 5,201—an 87 % year‑over‑year gain. These figures confirm that New York not only attracts outsized investment but continues to cultivate and supply the specialized talent required to deploy it, positioning the city as a resilient, diversified engine for the next wave of tech—and AI—innovation.
NY CSA Month -Over-Month: Total Deal Volume & Total Capital Deployed
Leading Verticals in NY (Q4 2024 -Q1 2025)
141 deals
139 deals
64 deals
Month-Over-Month US VC Deal Volume
The gap between the number of deals in the New York CSA and in the Bay Area continues to narrow as New York startups gain momentum in AI, FinTech, and HealthTech.
Biggest Deals in NYC Q4 2024 - Q1 2025
71 % of U.S. VC dollars went to AI in Q1’25. OpenAI’s $40 B mega‑round skews the data, but Rogo, Ramp, and Hebbia AI keep NYC’s share of AI megadeals high.
Capital is concentrating on fewer, larger rounds in NYC, particularly in AI. For founders innovating outside the AI realm, the bar for Series A/B has risen, while seed checks have become scarcer.
New York City Megadeals Holding Firm
Ramp, NYC’s fastest-growing start-up, raised $150 million in a secondary transaction on March 3, 2025.
Headquartered in Flatiron, Hebbia AI Closed $130M in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz; Index Ventures, GV, Peter Thiel. Its post money valuation is ~$700M.
Headquartered in SoHo, Rogo closed $50M in a Series B round led by Thrive Capital J.P. Morgan Growth Equity, Tiger Global, Positive Sum; existing Khosla, BoxGroup, AlleyCorp. Its post-money Valuation is ~$350M up 4x vs. 2024.
NYC’s High Flyers
Runway (Series D) | ElevenLabs (Series C) | Just Salad (Private Equity Round) | Chestnut Carbon (Series B) | Odeko (Series E) | Reflection AI (Series A) | Aescape (Series AI) | ShopMy (Series B) | Orchid Security (Seed)
High flyers are companies whose rounds dwarf their peers’ at the same stage. Isolating them shows where early‑stage capital concentrates—even amid a sluggish global recovery—while cutting through the glare of billion‑dollar megadeals. These outliers reset the benchmark for success and prove NYC’s pipeline is thriving beyond its headline giants.
Q1 2025 Tech Job Postings
Tech:NYC’s homegrown jobs board hosted 4,552 job postings, including early-stage companies sourcing competitive talent!
AI: An Engine for Growth
AI has become the city’s rallying cry—and New York’s founders, investors, and technologists are responding in force. AI now permeates every layer of the local innovation ecosystem, from accelerating job creation and reshaping hiring trends to enhancing the ambition and sophistication of the solutions our startups deliver.
AI M&A Exit Spotlight
NYC scored one of the top 3 M&A Exits in Q1 2025 within the multi-agent systems & orchestration AI Agent Development platforms markets.
Braze is a NYC-based customer engagement platform that powers customer-centric interactions between consumers and brands. Braze acquired OfferFit for $325M. OfferFit is originally a Boston-based developer of an AI-based self-learning decision engine designed to make promotions profitable.
Q1 2025 AI Unicorn Spotlight
Clay is a New York City-based carbon removal company that raised $160 million in Series B funding from Cloverlay, DBL Partners, it’s existing investor Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and others.
The State of AI Jobs
*The term “AI Job” refers to a job posting that requires AI skills. The data visualized in the following three graphs was pulled from the University of Maryland’s AI Tool Maps, which uses an LLM to differentiate jobs requiring AI skills from those requiring other non-AI-specific skills. The figures represent estimates weighted to be above 90% accuracy.
AI-TO-IT JOBS INTENSITY
The AI-to-IT Jobs Intensity is a snapshot of how much of today’s tech hiring is focused on AI talent. It represents the count of all the brand‑new job ads explicitly looking for AI skills, divided by all the new postings requiring traditional tech roles like software engineers or IT support.
New York’s sustained 38% intensity tells that one out of every three new tech job postings requires AI-related skills.
In 2024 there were 25,337 unique job postings in the five boroughs seeking candidates with specific AI-focused skills. With 2,237 new jobs posted in March 2025 alone, industry researchers project that AI will transform the world of work, and NYC is already proving to be the engine behind that transformation.