Joanna Glasner

In total, investors poured $92 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for U.S. and Canadian startups in the third quarter, per Crunchbase data. That's a 35% decline from the prior quarter but up 50% from year-ago levels.

Active startup investors largely kept up or increased their dealmaking pace in the third quarter, even as overall venture funding declined with the absence of new record megarounds for AI leaders.

As the AI startup boom progresses, investors appear to be leaving few niches unfunded. That was apparent in this week's lineup of large funding rounds, which featured AI infrastructure providers, a foundational model developer, a content protection platform for the AI age, and other AI-focused startups among the top investment recipients.

For the third quarter of 2026, global cybersecurity- and privacy-focused startups pulled in a total of $6.8 billion, per Crunchbase data. That's up about 50% from the prior quarter and tied for the highest quarterly tally in years, as charted below.

Overall, investors put $38.5 billion into reported seed- through growth-stage financings for countries in the region in Q3, per Crunchbase data. Of that, a majority went to AI-focused companies, echoing the trends we've seen globally

Startup investors aren't exactly hitting pause, but they did scale back on giant rounds this past week, with just two startup financings in the multiple hundreds of millions. The biggest round went to AI infrastructure provider

That's not the only one. A number of companies whose names might feature on a playlist of 2021 boom-era unicorns have sold to acquirers in recent months, including one-time highfliers like Airtable Headspace and Miro . In many cases, companies are selling at valuations which, while not puny, are still far below their former peaks.

It was another interesting week for AI-related startup funding, with a number of large rounds and quirky companies. The largest financings went to Tenstorrent , a developer of AI processors and systems, and AI lab Flapping Airplanes . The quirkiest round, meanwhile, was undoubtedly a $200 million financing for Warhound , which wants to breed elite military dogs.

California companies have scooped up more than three-fourths of all U.S. startup funding this year. That, per Crunchbase data, is an apparent record share.

In an S-1 filing today preceding what could be the largest IPO ever, Anthropic laid out extensive new details about its earnings, growth, key stakeholders and the risks it faces going forward. Clocking in at 335 pages, the document wasn’t exactly light reading. However, in a preliminary once-over, we highlight some of the more intriguing disclosures.