The Most Active Startup Acquirers Of The Past 3 Years Aren’t Always Who You’d Expect

Joanna Glasner jglasner 0 Shares Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Companies that buy a lot of startups don’t always have a lot in common. Some are longstanding blue chip tech and pharmaceutical companies. Others are fast-growing venture-backed unicorns. And still others are more recent public market entrants looking to stay competitive in the age of AI. To get a sense of who’s buying in bulk, we used Crunchbase data to put together a list of 79 companies that acquired three or more seed- or venture-backed startups in the past three years. From there, we picked the most acquisitive names. The most prolific startup acquirers of the past 3 years Per Crunchbase data, the most prolific acquirers of seed- and venture-backed startups in recent years are Salesforce 1, OpenAI and Snowflake. Overall, our query showed six companies with six or more known purchases, charted below. For top-ranked Salesforce, high-volume M&A is nothing new.

The San Francisco software giant has purchased at least 91 companies in the past 20 years, per Crunchbase data. Its most recent startup purchases include Momentum, a revenue orchestration platform, and Cimulate AI, which focuses on agentic AI for e-commerce. OpenAI, by contrast, has a shorter track record of M&A shopping sprees. The pioneering generative AI company has bought 16 companies in the past three years. Among the most recent was an acqui-hire deal involving open-source AI agent OpenClaw and its creator, Peter Steinberger. This month, it also snapped up Astral, a creator of open source tools for software developers, and Promptfoo, an open-source tool for testing AI applications. Snowflake, meanwhile, has 19 acquisitions to date. Most recently, it acquired Observe, a developer of AI observability tools that previously raised more than $460 million in venture funding. Notably, recent the active acquirers list for recent years looks quite a bit different that the ranking of all-time top M&A dealmakers in the Crunchbase dataset, shown below: Highest-spending acquirers The most prolific startup buyers also aren’t always the biggest check-writers. By the latter metric, the far-and-away leader is Google, and its $32 billion acquisition of Wiz. For a broader picture view, we used Crunchbase data to put together a list of six companies that made the biggest-ticket funded startup acquisitions of the past three years. 2026 off to a promising start So far this year, it looks like the pace of startup M&A dealmaking remains fairly robust. This includes two deals in the multiple billions: Capital One’s $5.15 billion purchase of Brex and Eli Lilly’s $2.4 billion acquisition of Orna Therapeutics. The AI sector’s appetite for acqui-hires and smaller purchases of earlier-stage startups also continues to boost momentum. We’ll see if it keeps up. Related Crunchbase list: Most Prolific Funded US Startup Acquirers Of The Past 3 Years Related reading: Small And Mid-Sized Startup Purchases Are Still Well Below The 2021 Peak Crunchbase Predicts: Why The Race For Talent And Tech Could Accelerate Startup M&A In 2026 M&A The Highest On Record For Unicorn Exits In 2025 Illustration: Dom Guzman Salesforce Ventures is an investor in Crunchbase. They have no say in our editorial process. For more, head here.↩ TagsAI M&A marketing SaaS sales startups unicorn Stay up to date with recent funding rounds, acquisitions, and more with the Crunchbase Daily. You may also like Artificial intelligence • SaaS • Startups Don’t Just Talk About AI.

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