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

google — 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.