Venture capital funding worldwide totaled $159 billion in the third quarter, down 25% from the second quarter's record pace but up 53% from a year earlier, as artificial intelligence startups continued to pull in a disproportionate share of the money, according to data published by Crunchbase News.
AI-focused companies "across the stack" raised $102 billion of that total, or roughly 64% of all global venture dollars, Crunchbase reported. That share was down from the prior two quarters but still 14 percentage points above the equivalent figure in the third quarter of 2025. A record 27 companies closed rounds of $1 billion or more during the quarter — nearly double the previous record of 16, set just three months earlier. Eight of those rounds topped $3 billion, including matching $5 billion raises for data-and-AI company Databricks and AI research lab Safe Superintelligence.
North American startups pulled in roughly $92 billion of the global total, according to a Crunchbase-sourced breakdown cited by outlets including Ecosistema Startup — a 35% drop from the second quarter but still up about 50% from a year earlier. Much of that quarter-over-quarter decline reflects the absence of the kind of mega-rounds that inflated the second quarter's total, rather than a broad investor retreat: late-stage and growth funding in the region came to roughly $66.5 billion, itself up about a third from a year ago.
A Narrowing, Not a Retreat
Year-to-date global venture funding through September reached $679 billion, the highest nine-month total on record, Crunchbase said. That figure points to a market that looks less like a bubble deflating and more like one consolidating around a smaller number of very large, AI-centric bets. Crusoe, Moonshot AI, Mistral AI, Nscale, The Boring Co. and Kling AI each raised more than $3 billion of their own during the quarter, joining Databricks and Safe Superintelligence at the top of the list.
For founders outside the AI infrastructure race, the practical effect is a tighter fundraising market even as the headline total looks robust. Early-stage and seed activity have not kept pace with the growth-stage surge, leaving smaller companies competing for a shrinking slice of a number dominated by a handful of giants. Investors expect the imbalance to persist into the fourth quarter as long as a small group of frontier AI labs keeps setting the pace for round sizes.
