San Francisco

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Four Numbers, 176 Years Apart

1. The Bay Area took 60% of the world's AI investment last year, with 22% of the deals.

According to Crunchbase's 2025 figures, AI companies raised about $211 billion in venture capital globally — roughly one of every two venture dollars spent anywhere, and an 85% jump on the year before.

The San Francisco Bay Area captured $126 billion of it: 60% of the global total, from just 22% of the deals.

That gap is the actual story. San Francisco does not do the most deals. It does the biggest ones. Divide the annual figure and it comes to roughly $345 million a day flowing into Bay Area AI companies, every day, including weekends.

2. Of that $126 billion, $113 billion went to 92 companies.

Ninety-two. That works out at an average of about $1.2 billion each, and it means roughly 90% of the money went to fewer than a hundred recipients. Within the region, 81% of all startup capital went to AI — up eleven percentage points in a single year.

For scale from a different source: Carta's ecosystem data for July 2025 to June 2026 shows the Bay Area taking 41.3% of all startup capital on its platform, against 18.0% for New York and 8.7% for Boston. Roughly two and a half times the whole New York ecosystem.

3. The city's oldest continuously operating business is a jar of yeast.

Boudin Bakery was founded in 1849, during the Gold Rush. Its "mother dough" — a living wild yeast starter, believed to have come from one of the forty-niners — has been used in every loaf since, for more than 175 years. It survived the 1906 earthquake and fire, and it is still in the building at Fisherman's Wharf.

4. And the cable cars have been running on the same idea since 1873.

Andrew Hallidie, a wire-rope manufacturer, watched a team of horses lose its footing on a wet hill and drag a loaded cart down with it. He built an alternative: cars with no engine, gripping a cable that runs continuously beneath the street. He tested it in 1873. The principle has not changed.

The clock: San Francisco sits at about 122° west, on Pacific Time, which is built for the 120th meridian — leaving the city within roughly ten minutes of its own solar noon. One of the better-aligned cities on this site.

So: the two oldest working technologies in San Francisco are a yeast culture and a moving steel cable, both from the same decade. The newest industry moved a third of a billion dollars a day last year, into companies that mostly did not exist when the current mother dough was already a century old.

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