Q3 Venture Funding Fell 25% to $159 Billion, but 27 Companies Raised $1 Billion

Global venture funding fell to $159 billion in the third quarter of 2026, down 25% from $212 billion in the second, according to Crunchbase. It still broke a record: 27 companies raised rounds of $1 billion or more, and those 27 took about a third of all the money.

The comparison is against a quarter that held one outsized round. Anthropic's $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation closed in May. PitchBook, via SiliconANGLE, counted it among seven US rounds of $1 billion or more worth $87.2 billion combined in the second quarter. Crunchbase's year-over-year figure is the steadier one: the third quarter is up 53% from $104 billion in the third quarter of 2025.

The 27 rounds

Crunchbase counted 14 billion-dollar companies in the first quarter, 16 in the second and 27 in the third. Eight of the third-quarter group raised $3 billion or more.

Company	Round size (Q3 2026)
Databricks	$5 billion
Safe Superintelligence	$5 billion
Crusoe	$3 billion or more
Moonshot AI	$3 billion or more
Mistral AI	$3 billion or more
Nscale	$3 billion or more
The Boring Co.	$3 billion or more
Kling AI	$3 billion or more

1. Q114 companies
2. Q216 companies
3. Q327 companies

Source: Crunchbase News, Oct. 5, 2026

Rounds below $1 billion are the other end of the range: EliseAI raised $350 million at a $4 billion valuation and Type One Energy raised $200 million. Neither would have appeared in this table.

How concentrated it is

Crunchbase puts AI-driven startups at $102 billion of the $159 billion, or 64%. US companies took $91 billion, 57%, and the San Francisco Bay Area about $38 billion, 24%. Late-stage funding was $105 billion and early-stage $40.6 billion. Global seed funding was $13 billion.

PitchBook's first-half US numbers show the same shape from a different counter. AI companies took $355.9 billion of $412.7 billion, or 86%, and rounds of $100 million or more were 87.5% of deployed capital. Deals under $100 million were $51.4 billion, a 12.5% share against 43.8% in 2024.

The two datasets measure different things. Crunchbase's third-quarter figure is global and PitchBook's is US-only for the first half, so the percentages cannot be placed on one line. They point the same way.

North America

For the US and Canada, Crunchbase reports $92 billion in the third quarter, down 35% from the second and up 50% from a year earlier. Late-stage was $66.45 billion, early-stage $20.6 billion and seed about $5 billion on preliminary data. The largest rounds were Databricks at $5 billion, Crusoe at $3.9 billion, The Boring Co. at $3 billion and Cognition at $2 billion.

Year to date, global funding is $679 billion, the highest first-three-quarters total Crunchbase has recorded. Half of third-quarter capital went to companies founded since 2022.

Exits are the other half

Seventeen venture-backed North American companies went public in the quarter and raised just under $4 billion between them. The larger exits were abroad: ChangXin Memory Technologies raised $8.6 billion at an $85.5 billion valuation, and Unitree Robotics raised $905 million at $9 billion.

Acquisitions carried more value than listings. Crunchbase lists Nvidia's purchase of Hugging Face at $12.9 billion, AMD's of World Labs at $8.2 billion and Stripe's of OpenRouter at $7.5 billion, and counted 11 acquisitions of $1 billion or more in North America.

What to watch

Crunchbase notes that Anthropic is reportedly targeting a November IPO and OpenAI is expected to list in 2027. If Anthropic prices in November, the fourth quarter will show whether the 27-round count was a peak or a floor.