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Crunchbase is a company database tracking private-company funding rounds, valuations, and startup metrics, with editorial arm Crunchbase News.
Crunchbase puts Asian startup funding at $38.5 billion in Q3, the second-highest quarter on record, with about $21 billion going to AI. It takes flat deal counts to mean concentration is high but not intensifying, though the report does not say which quarter the count is flat against.
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Cybersecurity startups raised $6.8 billion in Q3 2026, up about 50% on the prior quarter, according to Crunchbase data. At least 18 AI-linked companies raised $100 million or more while round counts fell at every stage.
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Crunchbase counted 38 new unicorns worth $71 billion in September, putting 2026 at 311 and on track for second place behind 2021. Step-ups at Cognition, Crusoe and Mistral total about three-quarters of what the newcomers added.
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Andreessen Horowitz, Insight and Sequoia were among at least 22 investors in 10 or more Q3 venture rounds, most of them doing more deals as funding fell. Crunchbase ties the lower total to the absence of new record AI megarounds, while its lead-investor dollar rankings turn on a few multi-billion checks.
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European startups raised $25 billion in the third quarter, up 77% on the year and the most in four years, Crunchbase data shows. Seed and early-stage totals held flat against 2025, so the growth came almost entirely from a few late-stage companies.
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Investors put $92 billion into North American startups in the third quarter, 35% less than in the second, Crunchbase data show. Crunchbase ties most of the gap to OpenAI and Anthropic skipping megarounds, so the swing measures two companies' calendars more than investor appetite.
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Venture-backed AI companies bought 195 AI startups through Sept. 29, Crunchbase data shows, 14% more than all of 2025, while buyers rose just 2%. The same companies are buying more often, so sellers face a pool of acquirers that has barely grown.
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Homeward raised a $120 million Series D at roughly its 2021 valuation and added a $330 million asset-backed debt facility to fund more home transactions. Debt makes up nearly three-quarters of the $450 million in new capital, so Homeward's growth now runs mostly on money borrowed to buy and finance homes.
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Startups raised $159 billion in Q3 2026, the year's weakest quarter so far, yet a record 27 companies closed billion-dollar rounds, Crunchbase data shows. Their count has climbed every quarter of 2026 while totals fell, and AI took about nine-tenths of the gain on last year.
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Founders who seed-strap on small sums from friends, family and members skip the Series A, as 62% of US companies seeded in 2022 have done, according to Carta. The price of keeping growth targets in their own hands, says Precursor Ventures' Charles Hudson, is fewer investors for the next few million.
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Instinct, a year-old AI assistant maker, raised $1 billion at a $10 billion valuation, about 35% of the equity in the week's ten biggest U.S. rounds. With eight of the ten going to AI companies, the week's venture money sat in one sector and, to a large degree, in one round.
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Saronic's $1.75 billion Series D is about 58% of the nearly $3 billion venture investors put into marine startups over the past year. In Crunchbase's count the rest of the sector shared about $1.25 billion, so the headline figure mostly tracks one Navy supplier's fundraising.
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European AI startups raised a record $23 billion in the first half of 2026, up 130% and 55% of the region's venture funding. Two executives at HumanX Amsterdam said government mandates and corporate purchasing will decide what Europe gets for the money.
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Investors have put more than $6 billion into nuclear fission and fusion startups in 2026, a record by Crunchbase's count. The IPO market those investors would one day sell into has marked most recent nuclear listings far below their peaks.
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SpaceX took $86 billion of the $110.8 billion venture-backed companies raised in first-half 2026 IPOs, per Crunchbase, leaving $24.8 billion for the rest. That remainder is still about double last year's $12.6 billion, though the count of listings covers only companies valued at $1 billion or more.
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The CCPA access machinery companies have been building since 2020 just got a field test from one reporter with a spreadsheet. The failures cluster in support queue design rather than in the law itself.
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OpenAI says its new ChatGPT for Financial Services pairs built-in financial data with GPT-6 Astra reasoning for research, modeling and client materials. The announcement does not say where that data comes from.
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US tech layoffs hit 94,046 through August, up 16.8% on 2025, with May's 31,513 cuts accounting for more than twice that increase. Big employers set the monthly count, so the summer's 16.2% decline tracks their announcement calendars.
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Ivan Burazin told Business Insider that Daytona's best agent operators are former people managers, and the org he described runs about 80 agents behind 16 engineers who no longer write code themselves.
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Crunchbase counts $7.5 billion across 830 sales, marketing and CRM rounds so far in 2026. The six biggest disclosed deals hold about $2.3 billion of that, leaving roughly $6.3 million apiece for the other 824.
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