Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It's broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. If you want it in your inbox every Saturday morning, sign up here. Let's talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors. This week, Scale AI raised a $325 million Series E. The company, as TechCrunch has written, works in the data labeling space. And it has been on a fundraising tear over the last few years.

AI startups continued to outpace the overall U.S. venture capital market in the first quarter of 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic is expected to have a severe impact on funding across all sectors for the rest of the year. According to data from the National Venture Capital Association, 285 AI-related companies in the U.S. raised $6.9 billion in the first quarter of 2020. At that pace, AI funding would have easily topped the $19.98 billion raised by 1,509 companies in 2019, according to the Q1 2020 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. The report adjusted the latter up from its previous report of $18.05 billion for 2019. Those figures are the lastest sign of the growing impact technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are having on an expanding range of industries.