European startups raised $25bn in the third quarter, their strongest quarter for venture funding in four years. In North America, startup funding fell 35% from the previous quarter to $92bn, Crunchbase data shows.
Europe’s total was up 77% on the $14bn raised in the third quarter of 2025, Gené Teare reported for Crunchbase News on Thursday. AI companies took 75% of it, or $18.8bn, the highest share on record.
Four rounds took 40% of Europe’s money
Four European companies raised more than $1bn each in the quarter, close to 40% of the region’s total. Mistral’s €3bn Series D, about $3.5bn in Crunchbase’s figures, was the largest venture round ever for a European company.
The data centre provider Nscale raised a $3.36bn convertible note. The defence startups Helsing and Quantum Systems raised $1.8bn and $1.2bn.
The UK led with $7.5bn. Germany raised $5bn and France $4.8bn, their best quarters since 2021 and early 2022. Sweden followed with $1.5bn, ahead of the Netherlands on $1.4bn and Spain on $1.2bn.
North America fell without OpenAI and Anthropic
North America’s drop came mostly from the lack of new megarounds for OpenAI and Anthropic, Joanna Glasner wrote for Crunchbase News on Wednesday. OpenAI raised $110bn in the first quarter and Anthropic $65bn in the second. The third-quarter total was still 50% higher than a year earlier.
The largest rounds went to Databricks ($5bn), Crusoe ($3.9bn), The Boring Company ($3bn) and Cognition ($2bn). AI companies took $61bn, about two thirds of all funding.
There were 11 acquisitions of North American startups at a reported $1bn or more. The largest was Nvidia’s purchase of Hugging Face, for $12.93bn. Next came AMD’s deal for World Labs, valued at about $8.2bn, and Stripe’s purchase of OpenRouter, reportedly worth about $7.5bn. Seventeen venture-backed companies went public, raising just under $4bn between them.
AI startups are buying AI startups
Venture-backed AI companies bought 195 AI startups up to 29 September, 14% more than in all of 2025, Mary Ann Azevedo reported for Crunchbase News on Tuesday. The number of buyers grew only 2%.
OpenAI made 10 of the deals this year. Anthropic and the Stockholm legal AI company Legora announced five each. Harvey made four, including Guardrails AI in September. Sierra and Cursor made three each, and Cohere two. Only 12 of the 195 deals came with a disclosed price.
“M&A is explicitly part of how we accelerate what we’re building,” Legora’s chief financial officer, David Eckstein, wrote in a LinkedIn post earlier this year.