Crunchbase says 27 companies took a third of Q3 venture funding

Crunchbase News reports that near $680 billion of venture funding has gone out worldwide so far in 2026. The piece reads three charts of its own data. All three show the same split. The dollars keep rising. The number of cheques keeps falling. The gap is widening.

What the North American quarter looked like

North American startups raised $92 billion in Q3. That is 50 percent above the same quarter a year earlier. The deal count fell 16 percent year on year. It also fell 14 percent against the quarter before. About one third of the $92 billion went to 27 companies. Each of those 27 raised more than $1 billion in Q3 alone.

Writer Marlize van Romburgh says OpenAI and Anthropic drove the biggest surges earlier in the year. But the concentration is wider than those two names. The pattern shows up at every stage above seed.

Seed and early-stage are the ones shrinking

The piece is clear on which end of the market is thinning. Seed and early-stage deal counts have been dropping for several years. They dropped again this quarter.

Series B is the sharpest example in the article. The dollar total hit a multiyear high. The deal count hit a multiyear low. The same amount of money is going into fewer, larger rounds.

That split matters more than the headline total. A founder reading "$680 billion raised" is reading the wrong number. The number that applies to a seed founder is the deal count. That number is going the other way.

Three reads for a 2027 seed founder, a buyer and a hiring team

Three practical reads come out of the piece.

A founder planning a first round is competing in a smaller investor pool. The firms writing the big AI rounds are not writing many seed cheques. Plan for a longer process and a tighter list of target investors.

A buyer of AI software should expect more suppliers to come from a small set of large, well-funded labs. The seed layer that would have produced competitors next year is being capitalised less, not more. A category with two giants and few small firms is one where prices and roadmaps are set by the giants.

A team hiring senior AI engineers should know where the compensation ceiling will sit. The megadeal cluster is where the money is. Chart two in the piece shows deal counts falling while round sizes grow. Headcount at the funded firms is where that money goes.

Every figure here is Crunchbase's own count of its own data. The trend has been running for several quarters. The piece reads as the clearest statement of it so far rather than a new finding.

Source

Crunchbase News: More Money, Fewer Checks: These 3 Charts Show The Divide Behind VC's Record Funding Year, by Marlize van Romburgh.