For much of the last decade, Hong Kong's artificial intelligence investment story was, in large part, the story of one company. What the data now shows is that this may finally be changing.
Between 2011 and 2025, artificial intelligence startups accounted for a consistently small share of total venture capital deployed in Hong Kong. According to Crunchbase data, AI-related startups received less than 8% of total annual funding in every year between 2011 and 2017, rising to 40.2% in 2018, a figure attributable primarily to SenseTime's Series C and Series D rounds, which together totalled approximately $2.22 billion. The concentration of investment in SenseTime during this period has been attributed to a combination of strategic corporate investors and sovereign-linked capital. Excluding SenseTime, the AI share remained below 3% throughout the entire period.
At the ecosystem level, seed and pre-seed rounds accounted for 52.7% of all 347 recorded deals, whilst Series B and later-stage rounds totalled only 17 transactions across the full period, indicating a persistent early-stage concentration. Deal counts rose steadily from 2019, peaking at 45 rounds in 2021. These patterns suggest an ecosystem still in its formative stage, where investor appetite exists but confidence to scale beyond early bets remains limited.
Still from 2022 onwards, round-level data indicate a broad upward shift in deal sizes. The median rose from $191,500 in 2022 to $2 million in 2024 and $2.8 million in the partial 2025 data. The proportion of deals exceeding the 2022 median increased from 50% to 92.9% over the same period, and the largest single deal in each year represented less than 50% of total capital raised, confirming that the trend is not driven by isolated outlier transactions as before. Even in an early-stage-heavy market, the baseline looks like to be shifting upward, with larger deal sizes pointing to a capital environment that's growing in confidence and scale.
For a deeper look at the data underlying this analysis, including deal-level breakdowns, sector segmentation, and investor activity across states and regional AI ecosystems, write to us at team@aiworld.eu or to through the form.
Sources: Sensetime / Crunchbase