One way to look at the health of our state’s economy is to track two indicators: how much money did startups raise this year, and how much money did venture capital firms based here raise to put into startups in the future?

When those indicators are healthy, you get successful companies like Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Toast, HubSpot or Wayfair — companies that rent office and lab space and employ hundreds or thousands of people.

So let’s look at the data to see how 2025 is shaking out.

If the trends of the first three quarters continue in the fourth, the amount of money raised by Bay State startups could be slightly more this year than in 2023 or 2024 — though it’s still down from a peak of $35 billion in 2021.

But if the same is true with regard to the amount of money that venture capital firms here collect this quarter, that would be a lower level than we’ve seen in a decade: $2.6 billion.

And on the opposite coast, California, which always dominates the rankings in both money invested and money raised, is seeing a boom because of artificial intelligence companies. Money invested into startups there in the first three quarters of this year is already a third higher than the 2024 total, and is likely to eclipse that state’s all-time record of $164 billion in 2021.

Among the Massachusetts companies that have raised significant rounds of venture capital this year: fusion reactor startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems ($863 million); obesity drug developer Kailera Therapeutics ($600 million); the AI-driven science lab Lila Sciences ($350 million); and AI music creation startup Suno ($250 million).

I asked a trio of venture capitalists to provide some color commentary on 2025 — and look ahead to the coming year.

Michael Greeley, co-founder of Flare Capital Partners in Boston, invests in technologies that support the healthcare industry. He said that new leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services, overseen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with Congressional inaction, have made it hard for healthcare companies to understand how or whether they’ll be paid for particular kinds of services.

“Nobody can make a real decision on the future of [healthcare] businesses that rely on government payments” from HHS, which oversees government insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, Greeley said.

Turmoil at the Food & Drug Administration, Greeley added, has made it hard for startups developing new medicines to understand how long it will take to win approval from the agency — another arm of HHS.

“Entrepreneurs are saying, ‘We don’t even know what a clinical approval path looks like now, [because] people who should be working on it were fired. … The whole infrastructure to get drugs to market has been so compromised.”

Those factors have been reducing the number of initial public offerings and big money acquisitions in the healthcare and biopharma industries, Greeley said, and adding to investors’ wariness about putting more money into them.

“Compared to the last several years, I think 2025 has been a good year, sentiment-wise, in the Boston ecosystem,” said Lily Lyman, a general partner at Underscore VC, a Boston firm. She highlights investments in “applied AI” — using AI in specific industries, like pharmaceutical labs — cybersecurity, and robotics as industry sectors where this region is hatching a lot of promising companies.

Lyman also said that given the level of AI action in San Francisco, it is already proving a challenge for Boston to hold onto talented techies and entrepreneurs who come to colleges here.

“I think you can feel it, just the pace of change, the volume of talent, and density of talent, the amount of capital getting thrown around” in the Bay Area, Lyman said. “It’s definitely having a center-of-gravity moment that’s very palpable.”

Lyman pointed to two AI startups founded by MIT or Harvard drop-outs: Cursor, an AI programming tool, and Mercor, focused on helping companies identify and hire AI talent. Both companies, founded in 2022 and 2023, respectively, are valued by investors at $10 billion or more — and both have set up their headquarters in San Francisco.

She said her firm is willing to invest in young startups “while they’re on campus, and if they then go move to San Francisco, as an investor, we don’t totally care. Obviously, as a champion of the ecosystem, we’d love them to stay here …”

Another venture capitalist, David Frankel of the Cambridge firm Founder Collective, said that AI companies in places like San Francisco, London and Tel Aviv are actively recruiting employees on college campuses around Boston, which could drain the pool of future founders or employees locally.

“There’s no question that our institutions are a good hunting ground for a lot of these AI startups all over the place,” he said.

Frankel said 2025 has been a year of “haves and have nots” when it comes to startup fundraising. Two sectors — AI and crypto — have been in favor this year, while raising money in many other sectors has been “a struggle.”

What could change in 2025? All three of the investors said that if the pace of initial public offerings or acquisitions pick up, that will help demonstrate that startups are not just bottomless pits for money — but that they can actually help their investors reap big returns.

Frankel said that if the aerospace company SpaceX or the AI developer OpenAI went public, those would be “mega IPOs” that “could pave the way for others” to follow.

Over the course of the first year of the Trump Administration, Greeley said, “I’ve struggled to find a silver lining. … I think, sadly, innovation has been equated with immigration, education, elitism and they’ve all been conflated.”

Greeley said that investors depend on many different factors to help cultivate successful companies — including academic research in science and technology. With less research funding flowing to universities, taxes on university endowments and reductions in the number of visas granted to workers who want to come to the U.S., the current moment feels “hostile to the forces that drive innovation.”