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

View original at news.crunchbase.com
Crunchbase News - Funding Ma Title: The Most Active Startup Acquirers Of The Past 3 Years Aren’t Always Who You’d Expect Date: 2026-03-20 11:00 Source: https://news.crunchbase.com/ma/most-active-startup-acquirers-3-years-crm-openai-snowflake/ <p>Companies that buy a lot of startups don’t always have a lot in common.</p…
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  • The AI sector's appetite for acqui-hires and smaller purchases of earlier-stage startups continues to boost momentum

    60% confidence

  • Salesforce, OpenAI and Snowflake are the most prolific acquirers of seed- and venture-backed startups in recent years

    60% confidence

  • The pace of startup M&A dealmaking remains fairly robust in 2026

    60% confidence

  • 79 companies acquired three or more seed- or venture-backed startups in the past three years

    60% confidence

  • Snowflake has 19 acquisitions to date

    60% confidence

  • Salesforce has purchased at least 91 companies in the past 20 years

    60% confidence

  • Six companies made six or more known purchases in the past three years

    60% confidence

  • OpenAI has bought 16 companies in the past three years

    60% confidence

Data points we hold from this source

Salesforce · total acquisitions91 companies
OpenAI · total acquisitions16 companies
Snowflake Inc. · total acquisitions19 companies
What we know · the intelligence behind this page
Live from the substrate
What we're seeing
Enterprise AI Agents Go Mainstream, But Trustworthy Data Access Lags Adoption
A wave of enterprise AI agent activity — fresh funding (Latitude's $35M Series A), a run of CB Insights CEO interviews spotlighting fintech- and healthcare-focused agent startups (Covecta, Penguin AI, Maisa AI), and major platform partnerships (Microsoft-Mistral, Manulife-Microsoft AI governance, Siemens-NVIDIA agentic EDA, Box's agent security controls) — signals agentic AI moving from pilot to production across financial and enterprise workflows. Yet Google Cloud's own research shows adoption is outrunning data readiness (companies average AI access to only 45% of their data, with 'data laggards' capped near 30%), while insider selling at incumbent C3.ai hints at mixed investor conviction even as the broader ecosystem accelerates.
Our read on the data ›
Signals we're tracking
Satellite-Terrestrial Network Integration Acceleration
Increased investment and launches in hybrid satellite-cellular networks across telecom industry; competitive responses from other carriers; regulatory activity around satellite spectrum; expansion of emergency/rural connectivity use cases
Patterns we're watching ›
Where sources disagree
ING Group
Both facts record the same metric (shares_outstanding) for ING Group at the identical observation date (2025-12-31). FACT A states 2,902,437,688 shares; FACT B states 2,902 million shares (2,902,000,000). The difference is 437,688 shares (~0.015%). This is a genuine value conflict, though the discrepancy appears to result from FACT B rounding to the nearest million while FACT A provides the precise count.
We flag conflicts openly ›
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