Those were the unsurprising findings of a Crunchbase analysis of U.S. startup acquisition outlays in 2026. So far this year, acquirers have spent at least $119.8 billion buying private, venture-backed companies, on pace to exceed 2025's record-setting tally. For 2026, however, about half of total M&A spending on U.S. startups comes from a single deal: SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition of AI coding tool Cursor and its parent company Anysphere. SpaceX first announced an option to purchase the company in April and consummated the deal after its IPO this month. The Cursor purchase represents the largest startup acquisition of all time, nearly double the size of the prior frontrunner, Google's purchase of Wiz for $32 billion. After that, the next-biggest startup M&A deal was Facebook's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014. Biotech was especially big. This is due in large part to Eli Lilly, which announced in April that it was acquiring Kelonia Therapeutics, a developer of gene...
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