Sequoia Capital Publishes "The AI Agent Landscape" — $28B in Venture Funding in 2025
Sequoia Capital's annual AI report reveals that $28 billion in venture capital flowed into AI agent startups in 2025, a 4x increase from 2024. The report identifies agent infrastructure, vertical agents, and agent-to-agent protocols as the three hottest investment areas.
Sequoia Capital has published its annual "AI Agent Landscape" report, revealing that venture capital investment in AI agent companies reached $28 billion in 2025 — a fourfold increase from the $7 billion invested in 2024.
Investment Breakdown by Category:
| Category | 2025 Funding | % of Total |
|---|---|---|
| Agent Infrastructure | $10.2B | 36% |
| Vertical AI Agents | $8.4B | 30% |
| Agent Development Platforms | $4.8B | 17% |
| Agent-to-Agent Protocols | $2.8B | 10% |
| Agent Safety & Evaluation | $1.8B | 7% |
Key Trends Identified:
1. Vertical Agents Win: The highest-performing investments were in agents built for specific industries (legal, healthcare, finance) rather than general-purpose agent platforms.
2. Infrastructure is the New Platform: Just as cloud infrastructure created trillion-dollar companies, agent infrastructure (compute, memory, tool integration, orchestration) is attracting massive investment.
3. A2A is the Next Protocol War: Agent-to-agent communication protocols are emerging as a critical infrastructure layer, with multiple competing standards (Google's A2A, Anthropic's MCP, and several open-source alternatives).
4. Safety is a Feature, Not an Afterthought: Companies with built-in safety and evaluation frameworks are commanding 2-3x higher valuations than those without.
The report concludes that we're in the "infrastructure phase" of the agent revolution — similar to the early cloud era — and predicts that the first "agent-native" trillion-dollar company will emerge by 2028.