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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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What we drew from this source

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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

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

    60% confidence

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

    60% confidence

  • OpenAI has bought 16 companies in the past three years

    60% confidence

  • Snowflake has 19 acquisitions to date

    60% confidence

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

    60% confidence

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

    60% confidence

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

    60% confidence

Data points we hold from this source

OpenAI · total acquisitions16 companies
Salesforce · total acquisitions91 companies
Snowflake Inc. · total acquisitions19 companies
What we know · the intelligence behind this page
Live from the substrate
What we're seeing
The Agentic Takeover of the CFO's Office
Enterprise finance software vendors—BlackLine, OneStream, Numero AI, and Oracle—are racing to embed autonomous AI agents into core financial operations (close, consolidation, reporting), backed by consolidation M&A (Numero-Royu, BlackLine-WiseLayer), fresh leadership hires, and survey data showing nearly a quarter of CFOs plan to boost AI spending over 50%. Adoption momentum is strong even as at least one bellwether (Oracle) sees its stock lag year-to-date, suggesting the market hasn't yet fully priced in the shift from AI-as-feature to AI-as-agent in finance.
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
Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC
Two significantly different EPS values (10.21 vs 2.68 USD_per_share) are reported for Morgan Stanley on the same observation date (2025-12-31). Fact A specifies FY 2025, while Fact B's 'N/A' fiscal period is ambiguous. If both represent FY 2025 annual EPS, these values directly conflict. The magnitude of the difference (3.8x) is too large to attribute to rounding or minor calculation variations. The missing fiscal period in Fact B raises data quality concerns, but same-date observation + same attribute should reference the same period.
We flag conflicts openly ›
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