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According to Crunchbase, AI companies captured $37 billion in global venture funding in April 2026, or 66% of all venture funding.
Most of that money ($27 billion) still went to model companies. The next layer down from the foundational models is the approximate $5 billion that went into physical AI. These include investments in robotics, aerospace, drones, autonomous vehicles, and deep tech.
“one of the largest physical systems in the economy is sitting directly in front of us: commerce.”
That allocation explains how the venture investment thesis has evolved: invest heavily in the foundational labs, and invest secondarily in areas where Anthropic and OpenAI can't easily compete. Given the pace at which Anthropic and OpenAI are moving, this is understandable.
Physical AI companies require domain-specific expertise, application-specific data, sensor fusion, and are deployed away from desktop computers in highly constrained environments. The foundation models matter, but the moat lies in the domain-specific harness that bridges inference with the real physical world.
But it also reveals an irony.
Investors are willing to get excited about AI in the most exotic parts of the physical world — space, robotics, autonomous vehicles, even the human brain — while underestimating one of the largest physical systems in the economy sitting directly in front of us.
Commerce.
Most people are not launching satellites, operating drones, or plugging AI into their nervous systems.
They are buying stuff.
“The majority of dollars exchanged are impacted by foot traffic, store layout, vignette design, and static displays”
In the U.S., the National Retail Federation forecasts retail sales of $5.6 trillion in 2026 and the Census Bureau reported that ecommerce only accounts for 17% of retail sales. This means that the vast majority of dollars exchanged happens in physical stores where foot traffic, store layout, vignette design, pairing of products on mannequins, static displays, special events, and the arbitrary movement of product from the front of store to the back of store can have tremendous impact on the business.
Ecommerce is flush with tooling for marketing attribution, experimentation, and tracking. But the physical footprint, where 80% of retail dollars are spent, is still managed in a highly manual way.
At Waveform we're incredibly excited about how AI can modernize the management of omnichannel brands and retailers. This is physical AI with one of the largest opportunities for dollars to be saved.