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

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