Crunchbase: 27 companies with $1 billion+ rounds in Q3 2026
Investors spent less on start-ups than in the previous two quarters, but a record number of companies raised billion-dollar rounds. Rounds of $100 million or more now account for nearly 90 percent of late-stage funding.
In Q3 2026, venture capital funds (which invest in young companies in exchange for equity) invested $159 billion globally. Just under 6,000 start-ups received funding. The data comes from a Crunchbase (opens in a new tab) report and covers transactions reported by October 2.
It was the weakest quarter of the year. The amount was 25 percent lower than the $212 billion recorded in Q2, but 53 percent higher than the $104 billion a year earlier. It also exceeded every quarter since Q2 2022. From January to September, investors put in a total of $679 billion, the highest ever for the first three quarters of a year.
A record 27 companies raised rounds worth $1 billion or more, compared with 16 in Q2 and 14 in Q1. Those companies received about one-third of all the capital deployed in the quarter. Databricks and Safe Superintelligence raised the most, at $5 billion each. Crusoe, Moonshot AI, Mistral AI, Nscale, The Boring Co. and Kling AI each raised more than $3 billion.
Start-ups related to artificial intelligence raised $102 billion, or 64 percent of global capital. U.S. companies received $91 billion, about 57 percent of the total. Half of the money went to companies founded in 2022 or later.
The concentration is visible at every stage. Rounds of $100 million or more accounted for nearly 90 percent of late-stage funding and half of early-stage funding. In seed rounds, they made up $2.6 billion out of $13 billion. According to PitchBook, four of the 1,086 deals in the AI sector — namely the rounds for xAI, Anthropic, Nscale and Mistral — accounted for 46 percent of the value of all AI investments in the quarter. PitchBook estimates the value of AI deals in the quarter at $54.8 billion and defines the sector differently from Crunchbase, which is why the two firms’ figures differ.
For companies looking for an investor, this means that about one-third of the quarter’s capital went to 27 companies, while the rest was divided among thousands of others.