North American startups secured $92 billion in funding during the third quarter of 2026, marking a 35% decrease from the previous quarter but a 50% increase compared to the same period last year. The decline is primarily attributed to the absence of massive funding rounds for OpenAI and Anthropic, which had previously raised $110 billion and $65 billion respectively.
Artificial intelligence companies remained the primary focus for investors, capturing $61 billion of the total funding. Major late-stage rounds included $5 billion for Databricks, $3.9 billion for Crusoe, $3 billion for The Boring Co., and $2 billion for Cognition. More than a dozen startups secured rounds of $1 billion or more.
Early-stage investment totaled $20.6 billion, while seed, angel, and pre-seed rounds accounted for at least $5 billion. Notable early-stage deals included a $1.1 billion Series A for River AI, a $660 million Series B for Valar Atomics, and a $500 million Series A for Fab2. Physical AI startups Walden Robotics and Veeda AI led seed-stage activity with $300 million and $90 million respectively.
The M&A market saw 11 acquisitions of North American startups valued at $1 billion or more. Nvidia acquired Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, AMD purchased World Labs for approximately $8.2 billion, and Stripe acquired OpenRouter in a deal reportedly valued at $7.5 billion.
The IPO market remained relatively quiet, with 17 venture-backed companies going public on major U.S. and Canadian exchanges, raising a collective total of just under $4 billion. Market attention is currently focused on potential future public listings for Anthropic and OpenAI, with the latter expected to debut in 2027.
