Venture capital: North American start-ups raised $92 billion in the third quarter, including $61 billion for AI

According to Crunchbase, the total figure is down 35 per cent quarter-on-quarter due to the absence of major funding rounds from OpenAI or Anthropic, but is up 50 per cent year-on-year; the acquisition of Hugging Face dominates the list of deals.

According to data from Crunchbase, U.S. and Canadian startups raised $92 billion in the third quarter of 2026, from seed to growth rounds. That's 35% less than in the previous quarter, but 50% more than a year earlier. The decline is mainly due to the absence of new giant towers for OpenAI and Anthropic, which had raised $110 billion and $65 billion respectively in the first and second quarters; the number of deals remained stable.

AI still two-thirds

Around $61 billion went to AI companies. The biggest late-cycle rounds went to Databricks ($5 billion), Crusoe ($3.9 billion), The Boring Company ($3 billion) and Cognition ($2 billion). On the seed and Series A side, River AI ($1.1 billion in Series A), Fab2 ($500 million) and physical AI specialists Walden Robotics ($300 million) and Veeda AI ($90 million) stand out.

Exits were mostly in the form of buyouts: eleven acquisitions of North American start-ups exceeded $1 billion, led by Nvidia's Hugging Face (12.93 billion), World Labs by AMD (around $8.2 billion) and OpenRouter by Stripe (around $7.5 billion). IPOs remained low-key, with 17 venture-backed companies listed for just under $4 billion raised.