Companies that buy a lot of startups don’t always have much in common.
Some of them are long-established large technology and pharmaceutical firms. Others are fast-growing venture-funded unicorns. Still others are recent public market participants who wish to remain competitive in the era of artificial intelligence.
To discover who is buying in bulk, we used Crunchbase data to compile list of 79 firms that has acquired three or more seed or venture-backed startups in the past three years. From there we selected the catchiest names.
The most prolific startup buyers of the last 3 years
According to Crunchbase data, the most prolific buyers of seed and venture-backed startups in recent years have been Sales power 1, OpenAI AND Snowflake. Overall, our query found six firms with six or more known purchases, as shown in the chart below.
For top-ranked Salesforce, massive mergers and acquisitions are nothing recent. The San Francisco-based software giant has purchased at least 91 firms over the past 20 years, in keeping with Crunchbase. His recent startup purchases include Momentumrevenue orchestration platform and Simulated artificial intelligencewhich focuses on agent-based AI for e-commerce.
OpenAI, on the other hand, has a shorter history of M&A purchases. The pioneering generative artificial intelligence company has acquired 16 firms in the last three years. The newest ones included: takeover-lease open source ai agent contract OpenClaw and its creator, Piotr Steinberger. It got here up this month as well Astralcreator of open source tools for developers and Hintan open source tool for testing AI applications.
Meanwhile, Snowflake has made 19 acquisitions so far. Recently acquired Observedeveloper of artificial intelligence surveillance tools that previously raised over $460 million in enterprise funding.
It’s price noting that the recent list of active acquirers in recent years looks very different than the rating of top all-time M&A movers in the Crunchbase dataset, shown below:
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Highest spending clearing agencies
The most prolific startup buyers aren’t always the biggest check writers either. According to this last criterion, he is a clear leader Googleand acquiring the company for $32 billion Wizard.
To get a broader picture, we used Crunchbase data to compile a list of the six firms that have made the largest ticket-funded startup acquisitions over the last three years.
The yr 2026 is off to a promising start
So far this yr, it looks like the pace of startup M&A deals stays quite high.
This includes two multi-billion transactions: Capital firstpurchase of the company for USD 5.15 billion Brex AND “Eli Lilly”acquisition of the company for $2.4 billion Therapeutic Orna. The AI sector’s appetite for acquisitions and smaller purchases of earlier-stage startups also continues to grow.
We’ll see if this holds up.