Cursor Deal Puts US On Track For Record Startup M&A Year

When someone spends $60 billion to buy a startup, M&A spending suddenly starts looking pretty robust.

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.

Other big M&A deals

While other 2026 startup purchases weren’t setting records, many of them were still on the historically large size.

To illustrate, we used Crunchbase data to put together a list of the 10 largest disclosed-price U.S. startup acquisitions this year. 1 The bottom nine range from $2 billion to $7 billion.

Biotech was a standout

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 therapies with a particular focus on cancer treatment, in a deal valued at up to $7 billion in cash. Per Crunchbase data, the high end of the purchase price represents the largest acquisition of a venture-backed biotech company in years.

Lilly was also the acquirer in two other deals in our Top 10 ranking. The pharma giant bought Orna Therapeutics, a developer of RNA therapeutics, for up to $2.4 billion, and Ajax Therapeutics, a developer of blood cancer therapies, for up to $2.3 billion.

Overall, half of the 10 largest deals this quarter were biotech transactions. However, in most cases the number represents the maximum potential acquisition price, which will require the acquired company to meet pre-determined milestones, typically around clinical results and commercialization.

Brex, Modular and more

Outside of biotech and, of course, Cursor, the next-largest acquisition was Capital One’s purchase of business credit card and account provider Brex for $5.15 billion. It’s followed by Qualcomm‘s acquisition, announced yesterday, of AI chip startup Modular for $4 billion.

Further down the list is Salesforce’s 2 acquisition this month of Fin, a provider of AI-enabled customer experience tools, and Autodesk’s purchase of MaintainX, an industrial AI platform, each at $3.6 billion.

With the second quarter winding to a close, we wouldn’t rule out the likelihood of another big deal making headlines in coming days. Even if that doesn’t happen, however, it’s already clear that 2026 is shaping up as a big spending year for startup M&A.

Related Crunchbase queries:

• Acquisitions Of US Venture-Backed Private Companies, 2026
• Largest 2026 Acquisitions Of US Venture-Backed Companies

Illustration: Dom Guzman