April in Review: Global startup funding remains steady, while AI continues to draw headlines and industries like Telehealth drive growth

April 2025 proved to be an eventful month for the global startup community. 

On the one hand, data from The Economic Times suggested that deals were down. Startups across early and late stages raised funds through 104 deals, compared to 116 in the year-ago period. This was down 12% from 2023.

Other data suggests that global venture funding is largely flat year over year, following the latest April 2025 total of $23 billion in total global venture funding. 

This is despite the record-breaking month in March, largely driven by the single largest private financing deal for OpenAI at $40 billion. 

While interest in AI has shown no signs of slowing anytime soon, it has been coupled with rising concerns about the environmental footprint of AI, thanks to its demands on the power grid and the water needed to keep data centers cool. This followed remarks from Sam Altman, who highlighted that saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ when interacting with AI collectively adds up to millions in costs.

Still, a report released this month from the International Monetary Fund found that economic gains outweigh the costs of rising carbon emissions, boosting global output by around 0.5% a year between 2025 and 2030. 

April also saw interest in AI-generated code rise at a sharp rate. Microsoft’s CEO shared that up 30% of the company’s code is already made with AI during a fireside chat.  

Despite the enduring buzz around AI, many industries are gaining ground by doubling down on use cases. 

Telehealth has exploded in the past several years, expedited by the COVID pandemic and many of us not wanting to do something in-person that we can do on a device.

Meanwhile, the world of pet tech health has exploded alongside the rates of pet ownership, led by organizations such as Leap Venture Studio. As the surge in new owners look at pet care in a different way to their predecessors, it’s fueling the pet care economy, expected to grow from $380 billion to more than $500 billion by 2030, as owners look to improve the health and wellbeing of their pets for longer, more comfortable lives. 

As with mainstream healthcare, telehealth is also taking flight here, as seen with California-based startup Airvet. The company raised an $11 million Series B-2 this month led by HighlandX.

With that, let’s take a look at some of the trending startup stories from April in more detail. 

USC Marshall/Greif Incubator strides forward with events and competitions 

The USC Incubator, led by Paul Orlando, shared its congratulations to the incredible work of its undergraduate team who won VCIC West and tied for 4th place globally at the 2025 Venture Capital Investment Competition. 

This was the first time that undergraduate students could participate in the competition, yet they punched above their weight and collective years of experience. The startup incubator gave a special shoutout to Carson Davis, Akshay Manglani, Henry Miller, Wednesday Satterlee, Vedant Kapoor, and Debra Erdenemandakh for their hard work and grit.

The USC Incubator also hosted a mentor session this April that saw experts and founders from established global startups share their experiences with the current cohort. 

Global think tank Horasis to host climate-focused startup panel in São Paolo, Brazil

As the relationship between tech and climate change grows, Horasis has decided to tackle the elephant in the room. 

Latin American and international enterprises in the GreenTech space are set to shine as the Horasis Global Meeting heads to São Paolo, Brazil. Horasis is an independent, global think tank that supports innovation in ways that benefit societal and economic goals. 

This April, it was announced they will host a new session in Brazil to spotlight climate-smart technologies, which will accelerate the transition to green tools and technologies. This is set to include AI-driven industries revolutionizing productivity and connectivity; nature-based solutions bridging ecology and economy; and sustainable infrastructure building resilient, inclusive societies.

Confirmed speakers already include Eric Aguilar, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Omnitron Sensors, USA;  Laura Mello de Andrea Constantini, Partner, Astella Investimentos, Brazil; Martin Dimitrov EMBA, Chief Executive Officer, WealthLock, Bulgaria with more to follow on. 

Leadsales CEO airs advice on funding for founders

Keeping on the regional focus of Latin America, Crunchbase News featured specific advice for founders based in the area. Roberto Peñacastro, CEO of Leadsales, leads an innovative startup focused on providing a specialized CRM for WhatsApp and social media. 

In the featured article, he shared a broad overview of the current VC landscape in the region, the key barriers to funding that startups here face, and the power of strategic partnerships. 

AI startup Prezent welcomes biopharma executive Janet Dorling to Board

Prezent has an ambitious roadmap to support organizational productivity by using AI to tackle the challenges that stem from poor business communication.

The AI platform for business presentations announced that Janet Dorling, Senior VP at Gilead Sciences, has joined its Board of Directors. Gilead Sciences is a global biopharmaceutical company dedicated to advancing innovative treatments for serious diseases. 

This marks a step forward for the company and its ability to service the biopharmaceutical industry with tailored solutions. 

Startup Aestro AI launches to transform the debt recovery process

Aestro AI is an Agentic Service as a Software company has recently hit the market after launching at Emerge Americas, a premier technology conference that took place in Miami.

The startup’s AI-driven platform empowers fintechs and community banks with an intelligent, automated, and cost-efficient solution for last-mile debt recovery to solve the growing challenge of hard-to-recover debt. 

During ongoing economic turbulence across all markets, mitigating risk is key for nearly ever sector. Yet fintechs and financial institutions in particular are under undue pressure stemming from non-performing loans, which negatively impact their balance sheets and raise the cost of capital. Aestro AI is looking to position itself as the go-to solution for this challenge for fintechs and banks across the Americas.

GPU startup SQream names new CEO to spearhead AI Factories

As demand for AI grows, more efficient ways of handling data and extracting insights will be key. 

SQream, a leader in GPU-accelerated big data processing, announced its ambitious plans to become the ultimate AI Factory enabler, in which enterprises transform massive data into AI-driven insight.

This comes with the appointment of new CEO, Liam Galin, who will spearhead this new era with his experience leading publicly-traded companies. 

Startups bring English language skills to children in Latin America

According to UNESCO, 44 million additional teachers will be needed globally by 2030. In Latin America in particular, 3 million teachers will be required. With fewer teachers comes overcrowded classrooms, making subjects that require one-on-one attention, like language learning, even harder.

Buddy.ai is on a mission to democratize access to English tuition in Latin America as the world’s first voice-based AI tutor designed specifically for kids, in an interview with founder Ivan Crewkov. 

Skystem founder Shagun Malhotra details power of automated finance controls for enterprises

The critical role of CFOs in the 2025 were highlighted by Novobrief in an article exploring financial change within organizations. 

Here, Shagun Malhotra, Founder and CEO of Skystem, spoke about the benefits of automated accounting controls that support financial reporting, year end close reports, audit processes and more to avoid the headaches that come from poorly managed systems and manual finance processes. 

Y Combinator startup DeepSource releases autonomous AI agents 

As AI-generated code becomes more prominent in both major software providers and new startups, DevSecOps teams are fighting to maintain app security and bugs in these huge volumes of code. 

DeepSource, a San Francisco-based unified DevSecOps platform for securing code, announced in April the launch of three fully autonomous AI agents to save coders hours of work by scanning and fixing code security vulnerabilities.

According to a statement from the organization, the new AI Agents observe key events, apply reasoning to optimize for their security goals, and autonomously take action to proactively keep code bases secure.

Big data enterprises expanding

As the tech sector continues to grow in Latin America, Ecuador in particular is expected to see its digital economy grow by 18% annually in welcome news. 

Big data and ML enterprise Source Meridian is a company long at the forefront of change in the region and, with offices in the US and Colombia, frequently tops the lists of best companies to work for in the Americas. This April, the company announced the opening of a new office in Ecuador, where it hopes to boost the country’s tech scene.