For all the chatter about the decline of San Francisco, data repeatedly shows that the Bay Area, including the city itself, is still the best place for venture-backed startups.Startups located in the Bay Area vacuumed up $90 billion of VC investment in 2024, which was 57% of the $178 billion of global venture funding spent last year, new stats released on Tuesday by Crunchbase show.In 2024, OpenAI, headquartered in San Francisco, was obviously the mothership, both in spawning a nearby AI startup industry complete with its own deep-pockets startup fund, and in the VC dollars it scooped up for itself. But others include: San Franciscos Databricks and its record-breaking $10 billion in funding; Elon Musks xAI, which raised $12 billion in two rounds last year and promptly moved into OpenAIs old headquarters in the San Francisco Mission District; Mountain Views Waymo and its $5.6 billion Series C; San Franciscos Anthropic, which raised over $8 billion in 2024; as well as big raises in 2024 from San Franciscos Scale AI and Perplexity.And, as we previously reported, this isnt just happenstance. Its a result of the areas dominance in AI, the biggest tech of 2024, as well as being home to Big Tech (Google, Nvidia, Salesforce, etc.), and a longstanding startup infrastructure there from Y Combinator to the VC-land of Sand Hill Road. This self-fulfilling cycle shows no indications of flagging in 2025, in part because the Bay Area still offers the largest concentration of skilled tech employees. Some 49% of all Big Tech engineers (often the startup founders of tomorrow) and 27% of startup engineers are located there, according to data from SignalFire.With such high density of everything from financiers to engineers, meeting the people necessary to build a startup is just easier, say founders whove relocated to San Francisco in 2024. We feel like the talent pool is better. Also the customer pool is better, Anh-Tho Chuong, co-founder and CEO of open source billing platform Lago, previously told TechCrunch.