We’ll start with late stage, which, as usual, took in the largest share of funding. A total of $23.8 billion went to late-stage and technology growth deals in Q3 of 2024. That’s an increase of 28% from the prior quarter and 19% from year-ago levels. Round counts totaled 246. That was up a bit from the prior quarter, and roughly flat with Q3 of 2023. Below, we chart both round counts and total investment for late-stage and technology growth deals over the past five quarters. The rise in total investment was largely due to a single deal — Alphabet’s $5 billion July investment in autonomous driving spinoff Waymo. But since that was categorized as a corporate investment rather than a venture capital round, it doesn’t serve as a strong indicator of the broader venture funding climate. We did, however, also see some more traditional, large late-stage venture rounds in Q3. Top among them was defense tech startup Anduril’s $1.5 billion Series F in August. Additionally, Vancouver-based legal tools platform Clio locked up a $900 million Series F at a $3 billion valuation. Other big deals included: AI chip company Groq, which landed a $640 million Series D, and another AI startup, Cohere, which picked up a $500 million Series D. Also, cell therapy developer ArsenalBio secured $325 million in Series C financing and AI coding startup Magic, picked up a $320 million Series C. Early stage Early-stage investment declined some in Q3, with $13.5 billion in total funding, per Crunchbase data. That’s a decline of 39% from the prior quarter and roughly flat with year-ago levels. Round counts, meanwhile, were down slightly. For a bigger picture view we chart out total early-stage investment and round counts for the past five quarters below. It should be noted that Q2’s high early-stage tally was largely due to a single $6.4 billion round for Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI. Without that deal, the Q3 decline would have been much less pronounced. Meanwhile, Q3 included a number of large early-stage deals. The largest such round by a long shot was a $1 billion September financing for Safe Superintelligence, an AI research lab co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. The round reportedly valued the Palo Alto, California-based company at $5 billion. Other big rounds included a $370 million September Series A for San Diego-based Candid Therapeutics, a developer of therapies for autoimmune diseases, and a $300 million July Series A for Pittsburgh-based Skild AI, a developer of software to power robots. Overall, there were 17 early-stage rounds of $100 million or more in Q3, a majority of which went to biotech startups. Seed stage Seed investment declined some in Q3, with $3.3 billion invested across nearly 1,207 known rounds. We expect round counts to rise in coming months, however, as more deals are entered into the database. Overall, Q3 investment totals were the lowest in years. Below, we charted out how round counts and investment totals compared over the past five quarters. M&A We saw a few large acquisitions announced during the quarter in sectors from cybersecurity to biotech. Standouts include: