North American Startup Funding Cools to $92B, Yet Still Runs Hot

Posted on in Entrepreneurship

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A 35% drop sounds like bad news until you look at the comparison. Seed through growth-stage investment in U.S. and Canadian startups reached $92 billion in the third quarter of 2026, down 35% from the second quarter but up 50% from a year earlier, according to venture data published in early October. Deal counts held fairly steady, and roughly two-thirds of the money went to AI-focused companies.

Where the megarounds went

The decline mostly reflects what did not happen. OpenAI and Anthropic, which raised $110 billion and $65 billion in the first and second quarters respectively, did not close new megarounds this time. Without those two giants the totals look smaller, but the analysis says the dip does not appear to reflect any broad weakening in the venture climate.

  • Late stage and growth: $66.45 billion, up about a third year over year. The biggest rounds went to Databricks ($5 billion), Crusoe ($3.9 billion), The Boring Co. ($3 billion) and Cognition ($2 billion). More than a dozen companies raised $1 billion or more.
  • Early stage: $20.6 billion, led by River AI's $1.1 billion Series A, Valar Atomics' $660 million Series B and Fab2's $500 million Series A.
  • Seed and pre-seed: at least $5 billion on preliminary counts, below both the previous quarter and last year, with Walden Robotics ($300 million) and Veeda AI ($90 million) on top.

A $1.1 billion Series A would once have looked like a typo. Today it is a line item. AI-focused rounds alone came to $61 billion, sharply down from the two previous quarters but still among the highest totals on record.

Exits are picking up

The quarter brought 11 North American startup acquisitions worth $1 billion or more. The largest was Nvidia's $12.93 billion purchase of Hugging Face in September, followed by AMD's roughly $8.2 billion all-stock deal for World Labs and Stripe's reported $7.5 billion acquisition of OpenRouter. Seventeen venture-backed companies went public in the U.S. and Canada, raising just under $4 billion combined, with biotech names leading. Anthropic is reportedly considering a listing as early as November, and OpenAI, which filed confidentially in June, is expected to debut in 2027. Things could still turn south, the analysis concedes, but for now the AI-driven momentum continues.