Some of the AI industry’s fastest-growing startups are becoming serial acquirers, buying smaller companies to fill product gaps, enter new markets and bring specialized teams in-house, a review of Crunchbase data shows. While AI giant Open AI is by far the busiest of these buyers, well-funded startups in legal tech, customer service and software development have also made multiple acquisitions this year. The buying spree has pushed acquisitions of AI startups by other venture-backed AI companies to 195 through Sept. 29, according to Crunchbase data — 14% more than in all of 2025.
Yet the number of buyers grew just 2%, indicating that increasingly active acquirers are driving much of the increase. Those deals point to a new phase of competition in the AI sector: Well-funded startups are using M&A to broaden their products and reach new customers faster than they could by building everything themselves. In legal tech, for example, acquisitions are bringing research, regulatory monitoring and litigation tools into broader platforms.
Legora CFO David Eckstein described that calculus in a LinkedIn post earlier this year explaining the company’s back-to-back purchases of multiple startups: “M&A is explicitly part of how we accelerate what we’re building. The question we always ask is: does this deal get us somewhere faster than we’d get there ourselves?” Repeat buyers step up dealmaking Some of the AI acquirers have returned to the dealmaking table more than once in recent years, Crunchbase data shows. Across the three-year period, 67 repeat buyers accounted for about 42% of all transactions tracked.
Open AI was by far the most active, with 20 AI-related acquisitions, including 10 this year. This year’s other repeat buyers include Anthropic and legal AI startup Legora, which have each announced five acquisitions, followed by legal AI startup Harvey with four. Customer-service AI provider Sierra and coding company Cursor have each made three acquisitions this year, while Cohere announced two.
Many of the buyers are vertical AI startups acquiring companies in their respective areas. Several of this year’s transactions are sizable. Nscale’s reported $1.65 billion acquisition of Anyscale was the largest with a recorded price, followed by Cyera’s $1 billion acquisition of identity security startup Oasis Security.
Anthropic’s acquisition of Coefficient Bio, which develops AI for pharmaceutical research, was valued at $400 million. Open AI’s $300 million acquisition of Glass Imaging, a Los Altos, California, startup that uses customized AI in camera hardware for computational photography, and Sword Health’s acquisition of Kaia Health, valued at up to $285 million, rounded out the five largest deals recorded in the dataset through Sept. 29. Overall, prices were disclosed for only 12 of the 195 deals, making it difficult to gauge how much AI startups are spending on acquisitions overall.
Dealmaking has clearly picked up as more AI companies turn to acquisitions — and, in some cases, make them a recurring part of their growth strategy. “It’s all about speed in the AI world,” according to Rama Sekhar, partner at Menlo Ventures, which has backed numerous AI startups including Anthropic and Legora. “It’s faster to acquire a team or product than build it yourself. If you’re not growing 10x, you’re not interesting to growth investors, which leaves a gap in the funding market for AI startups that need a home. High valuations have also given AI startups cheap currency to use their stock to get these deals done with minimal dilution.”.
Source: Crunchbase News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing