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Exclusive: Payments Tech Startup Routefusion Raises $26.7M Series A
Routefusion, an Austin, Texas-based financial infrastructure provider, has raised $26.7 million in a Series A round led by PeakSpan Capital, the company told Crunchbase News exclusively. Silverton Partners also participated in the financing, which brings the company’s total funding raised since its 2018 inception to $40.7 million. Other backers include Initialized Capital and Forum Ventures, among others. Colton Seal, co-founder and CEO, declined to reveal at which valuation this round was raised, saying only that it was an up round. The company last raised in January 2022 — a $10.5 million seed round. Overall, global venture funding to financial technology startups has already reached $36 billion across 2,810 deals in 2025 as of Oct. 8, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 28.93% increase in dollars raised compared to the $26.9 billion raised across 3,508 deals during the same time period in 2024. Accessible unified networkRoutefusion co-founders Richard Scappaticci Jr., Colton Seal and Nabeel Siddiqui. Courtesy photo. Routefusion has created a single API that it says gives businesses the ability to embed accounts, payments, currency conversion and compliance into their products. Put more simply, it aims to make it easier for platforms and financial institutions to open global accounts and make international, or cross-border, bank-to-bank payments. It works with over 30 customers in the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, Mexico and Brazil. Those customers span a variety of industries, including payroll and employer-of-record, B2B payments and banking, and include Payment Labs, Rise, Jeeves and Clara. What sets Routefusion apart, according to Seal, is that it was built as a unified network, with multiprovider and multibank redundancy. “We are highly configurable and have positioned ourselves to be adaptable to the most complicated use cases, both from a technical and compliance perspective,” he told Crunchbase News. And unlike traditional middleware, Routefusion manages integrations, onboarding and compliance in-house, which Seal said allows businesses “go live faster and scale globally without managing fragmented infrastructure.” Competitors include Airwallex and Wise. Those companies are more focused on consumers and SMBs, however, while Routefusion targets global platforms and financial institutions as customers, according to Seal. Over the past 12 months, Routefusion has seen its revenue triple, he said, although he declined to reveal hard revenue figures. The company operates with a usage-based revenue model and charges platform access subscription fees. “We operate capital efficiently and see ourselves as able to reach profitability with this round of funding,” said Seal, who previously worked as a network engineer for Citi. The company is also planning to use its new capital to invest in its engineering, product and compliance teams while also experimenting with GTM programs. Presently, Routefusion has about 25 employees. Justin Kelly, vice president at PeakSpan Capital, said his firm invested in Routefusion because it sees the startup as “a mission-critical infrastructure provider.” “Most providers are either application-first with an API bolted on or thin middleware that leaves customers to stitch together banks, FX, and compliance themselves. Routefusion is API-first at the surface but operated end-to-end underneath,” he told Crunchbase News via email. “What this means in practice is that, in addition to providing access to its network, the company also supports customers in running ‘the hard parts’ of a cross-border payments or global accounts program: integrations, onboarding, compliance workflows, and post-launch maintenance.” Related Crunchbase query: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Asia Startup Investment Up In Q3
Asia’s startup funding rose sequentially in the third quarter, boosted by a handful of hardtech-focused megarounds. Overall, investors put $16.8 billion into reported seed- through growth-stage rounds for companies across Asia, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 20% increase from the prior quarter and a 16% rise from the year-ago period. But while funding is up in the short-term, investment remains well below the levels typical a few years ago. In multiple quarters in 2021 and 2022, funding was more than twice current levels. Still, sequential improvement is a positive indicator. And for Q3, it’s also encouraging that reported round counts were up along with total funding, rising by around 10% from Q2. Table of contents China leads, India lags Funding gains were unequally distributed among countries in the region, with some posting sharp gains and others seeing investment fall. China: China, the region’s largest recipient of venture investment, was among those in the plus column. Funding to China’s startups hit $6.2 billion in Q3, up 13% from an unusually weak Q2. Even with those gains, however, China funding is down from a year ago and far below 2022 and 2023 levels. The largest financing went to Galactic Energy Aerospace Technology, a developer of commercial launch vehicles, that raised $337 million in a late-September financing. Two robotics-focused companies, X Square and EngineAI, also secured $140 million each. India: India, the second-largest venture funding destination in Asia, saw investment contract in the third quarter. Per Crunchbase data, a total of $2.7 billion went to reported rounds for India-based startups in Q3, down 22% quarter over quarter and the lowest tally in two years. Even so, there were some larger rounds in the mix. Truemeds, an online pharmacy and telemedicine app, picked up $65 million in Series C funding. And Flipspaces, a design tech brand, closed on $50 million. Singapore, Israel and other top funding destinations While China and India, with roughly 60% of Asia’s population, are predictably the continent’s largest venture markets, several smaller countries also proved popular with investors. Singapore: Startups in the Southeast Asian financial capital landed a combined $2.4 billion in Q3, nearly triple year-ago levels. The quarter included a $220 million Series C for Airalo, an eSIM provider for mobile devices enabling data connectivity for travelers. Israel: Funding to Israeli startups was estimated at $1.4 billion in Q3 — down from the prior quarter, but still up significantly from a year earlier. Noma Security, a cybersecurity platform for AI and autonomous agents, closed on the largest venture fund, a $100 million Series B. The next-biggest was a $96 million Series B for Exodigo, based in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, focused on underground mapping. UAE, South Korea, Japan and Saudi Arabia: For other Asian nations, fluctuation was the only consistent attribute for funding levels. United Arab Emirates was one of the gainers, largely due to big rounds for Dubai-based companies. One standout was Xpanceo, a developer of connected smart contact lenses that pulled in $250 million in a July Series A. South Korea funding also ticked up in Q3. The largest round for the quarter was a $250 million financing for AI semiconductor startup Rebellions. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, clinched a big round with payments platform Hala closing on $157 million for its Series B. And in Japan, overall funding was down, but we did see some jumbo-sized rounds, including a $100 million Series B for back-office automation provider LayerX. Late stage, early stage and seed Overall, late-stage and technology-growth deals captured the largest share of funding across Asia. For Q3, investors put $8.3 billion into 151 reported rounds at these stages. In dollar terms, it was the highest quarterly total for the year. Early-stage dealmaking also saw a pickup in Q3, with reported investment hitting $6.7 billion, also a quarterly high for the year. At seed, meanwhile, it appears investment declined in Q3 based on reported totals. However, we expect these numbers to rise some over time, as deals at this stage are often recorded in the dataset weeks or months after they close. AI funding rises We also broke out the share of Asian funding going to AI-focused companies, given the popularity of this investment theme in recent quarters. For Q3, AI-related investment rose significantly, hitting the highest total on record. Better, but still room for improvement Overall, Asia startup funding tallies for the third quarter indicate some improvement in the flow of investment. Given that the region is home to most of the world’s population and still pulls in a disproportionately small share of total funding, clearly there’s room for growth. Perhaps we’ll see some more progress in that direction next quarter. Methodology The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data is as of Oct. 6, 2025. Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year. Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price. Glossary of funding terms Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less. Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million. Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round. Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.) Illustration: Dom Guzman
Europe’s Venture Scene Held Steady In Q3, Buoyed By Early-Stage Funding And Klarna IPO
Klarna’s long-awaited IPO provided a standout moment for Europe’s venture ecosystem in Q3, but the more noteworthy signal may be what’s happening earlier in the funding pipeline. While late-stage startup investment in Europe remains relatively muted, early-stage funding has quietly become Europe’s engine of resilience — helping sustain overall funding levels even as global capital continues to concentrate around massive AI rounds in the U.S., Crunchbase data shows. All told, European startups pulled in $13.1 billion across more than 1,000 deals last quarter, flat quarter over quarter but up 22% year over year, per Crunchbase data. Early-stage investment accounted for roughly 60% of that total, buoyed by strong activity in deep tech, biotech and AI applications. This contrasts with North America, which has seen a surge of megarounds of $500 million or more, largely into AI-related companies, over the past four quarters. North American companies raised 68% of global funding in Q3, up 10 percentage points from a year ago, with two-thirds invested in later-stage financings. Table of contents Klarna debuts and strong M&A Sweden-based Klarna went public on the New York Stock Exchange in Q3 at a value of $15.1 billion, marking the completion of one of the most-anticipated European debuts in recent years. Still, while Klarna’s listing price was well above its most recent private valuation at $6.7 billion in 2022, it was still far below its 2021 valuation of $45.5 billion. Five European companies were also acquired for close to or more than a billion dollars each last quarter, including Sweden-based enterprise knowledge platform Sana, which was purchased by Workday, and Germany-based conversational AI platform Cognigy, acquired by Nice Systems. Other billion-dollar startup exits out of Europe last quarter were in healthcare — Vicebio and OrganOx — and Calastone, in asset management. AI stepped up Close to 40% of European funding was invested in AI-related startups last quarter, totaling $5.2 billion, per Crunchbase data. That was up from $2 billion in Q3 2024. The large fundraisers in the space were Paris-based frontier model company Mistral AI, which raised $2 billion, and London-based Nscale, a 1-year-old data center and cloud provider that raised $1.1 billion. (Within a week in early October, Nscale raised another $433 million from Nvidia, Nokia and Dell, among others.) Other large rounds in AI last quarter were raised by Sweden-based vibe coding startup Lovable, London-based accounts payable company Xelix, and Switzerland drone and robotics operations platform Auterion. Late stage Around $5.4 billion was invested last quarter across 75 deals into Europe startups at growth stage, per Crunchbase data. That represents around 9% of global late-stage venture funding, the smallest proportion compared to other funding stages. The Other late-stage fundings went to London-based smartphone and device maker Nothing, Netherlands-based website design Framer, and Italy-based embedded device security platform Exein. Early stage up Early-stage funding in Q3 was up year over year by 31%, with $6.1 billion invested across more than 257 funding rounds. European funding represented 20% of global early-stage funding. Early-stage rounds also went to Finland-based IQM Quantum Computers, Belgium-based Aerospacelab, and U.K.-based material science company CuspAI. Seed European seed funding totaled $1.7 billion in Q3 across 745 seed rounds, representing 18% of global seed funding. Large seed rounds were raised in energy, AI, biotech, fintech, autonomous driving and robotics, among other sectors. Robust early stage Early-stage funding to European startups picked up in Q3 with large rounds in deeptech, biotech and AI applications across many European cities. Europe’s early-stage funding represents around 20% of global venture funding, while funding lags at the later stages, coming in at 9% of global funding. So while Europe’s startups haven’t produced the splashy growth figures of their North American counterparts, the region has now delivered several sequential quarters of steady funding, not to mention resilient early-stage investment and strong exits in Q3. In fact, four of the nine companies acquired globally for more than $1 billion last quarter hail from Europe. As Europe and the U.S. come closer together, with many European founders launching in the U.S. market earlier, the question is: Will Europe continue to create those standout $10 billion-plus companies as it did most recently with Klarna? Methodology The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data is as of Oct. 6, 2025. Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year. Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price. Glossary of funding terms Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less. Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million. Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round. Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.) Illustration: Dom Guzman
EvenUp, AI Software For Personal Injury Law, Doubles Valuation To $2B As Legal Tech Funding Hits Record High
EvenUp, a legal tech startup that creates artificial intelligence products for the personal injury sector, has raised $150 million in Series E funding at a valuation exceeding $2 billion. The financing comes nearly one year after EvenUp announced a $135 million Series D at a valuation of more than $1 billion. In total, the San Francisco-based startup has raised $385 million in funding since its 2019 inception — closing four rounds since 2023. Repeat backer Bessemer Venture Partners led the startup’s latest raise, which also included participation from REV — the venture capital arm of RELX, which owns LexisNexis Legal & Professional — as well as SignalFire, B Capital, Adams Street Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, HarbourVest Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Broadlight Capital. EvenUp’s platform is powered by an AI model that is trained on hundreds of thousands of injury cases, medical records and internal legal knowledge. The platform helps with document generation, and case and negotiation preparation. “Legal AI is no longer a side bet; it’s becoming the backbone of personal injury law,” said Rami Karabibar, CEO and co-founder of EvenUp, in a release. He said that in the past six months alone, volume on the company’s platform nearly doubled to 10,000 cases per week. Venture funding to legal tech startups has already hit a record high in 2025, driven by investor enthusiasm for AI’s potential to bring more automation to the legal profession. On Sept. 23, Filevine, a provider of legal practice management software, announced that it closed on two previously undisclosed rounds totaling $400 million. Insight Partners led the first round and joined Accel and Halo Experience Co. to co-lead the second. Per Crunchbase data, companies in the legal and legal technology sectors have raised just over $2.5 billion as of early October in seed through growth-stage funding. With three months left in the year, it’s already the highest annual total on record. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
North American Startup Funding Held High In Q3
North American startup funding held strong in the third quarter, boosted by investors’ still-voracious appetite for artificial intelligence. In total, investors put $63.1 billion into reported seed through growth-stage rounds for U.S. and Canadian companies in Q3, per Crunchbase data. That’s up incrementally from the prior quarter. However, it’s far above year-ago levels, with more than $20 billion in additional funding. The high funding level was the result of bigger rounds, not more of them. For Q3, 2,276 reported rounds got added to the Crunchbase dataset 1, down a bit from the prior quarter and far below year-ago levels. Round counts were down at all stages except later stage. In addition to being more highly concentrated, the past quarter’s dealmaking was heavily AI-centric. Per Crunchbase data, roughly 57% of all North American funding went to companies in AI-related categories. This included the quarter’s largest round, a $13 billion Series F for Anthropic, which alone accounted for more than a fifth of total startup investment in the region last quarter. Of course, headline-grabbing gargantuan rounds weren’t the only trends to watch. We also saw an uptick in funding at early stage, and exit activity was reasonably strong, lifted by Figma’s splashy market debut in late July. Below, we look at funding for each stage in greater detail, and also take a look at AI-related investment and standout exits. Table of contents Late stage and technology growth Late-stage dealmaking was up sequentially in Q3, so we’ll start there. Altogether, an estimated $42.9 billion went to late-stage and technology growth financings last quarter. As charted below, it was the third-highest tally in the past five quarters. The aforementioned Anthropic megaround went a long way to boosting the totals. And while no other deal came close in size, there were also some other big rounds in mix. Cerebras, a developer of AI processors, closed out the quarter by raising $1.1 billion in Series G funding, later withdrawing plans for an anticipated IPO. Next were humanoid robotics startup Figure and quantum computing company PsiQuantum, both of which secured $1 billion financings. Early stage It was also a pretty good quarter for early-stage fundraising. Companies at Series A and Series B stage pulled in $15.6 billion in Q3 — the highest tally of the past five quarters, as charted below. The rise in funding resulted from larger average round sizes, however, not more deals. In fact, the number of reported deals actually hit a low point for the year this past quarter. Moreover, not every round classified as early stage goes to an immature startup. This is the case, for example, for the largest early-stage Q3 round, Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ $863 million Series B2. Although technically an early-stage round, it’s worth noting that the company was founded in 2017 and closed its initial Series B tranche nearly four years ago. Other standout early-stage rounds for the quarter hailed from sectors such as quantum computing, AI and biotech. This includes quantum computing startup Quantinuum, which raised a $600 million Nvidia-backed Series B, AI robotics platform Field AI, which announced two rounds totaling $405 million, and scientific intelligence platform Lila Sciences, which secured a $235 million Series A. Seed stage Unlike early stage, seed investment contracted in the third quarter. However, it should also be observed that Q2 was a hard act to follow, with Thinking Machines Lab scoring $2 billion in what ranks as by far the largest seed round of all time. Over the course of Q3, by contrast, investors put a total of $4.6 billion into reported North American seed rounds. That’s a decline of 25% from the prior quarter and 14% above year-ago levels. While seed stage is best known for smaller rounds to nascent companies, Q3 did bring us some rather large deals as well. Periodic Labs, a developer of AI tools for scientific experiments, picked up $300 million in initial funding, while Upscale AI and Tala Health each closed on $100 million. AI in Q3 Recently, we’ve also been breaking out AI funding in our quarterly reports, to see how this ultra-hot investment theme is impacting our tallies. For Q3, AI startup investment totaled $35.7 billion, roughly flat with the prior quarter and nearly double the year-ago number. The broad takeaway here is that AI venture dealmaking isn’t taking off compared to a few months ago, but it isn’t slowing down either. Exits: IPOs and M&A The just-ended quarter was also a reasonably active period for exits, with some large IPOs garnering particular attention. The far-and-away most attention-getting debut of the quarter was design software company Figma’s IPO on Nasdaq. Shares more than tripled in initial trading. However, demand has subsided since, leaving the company recently valued around $26 billion. Other good-sized debuts this past quarter came from StubHub, Netskope and Firefly Aerospace. There was less high-profile M&A activity during the quarter, although we did see some good-sized purchases. Atlassian was among the more prolific dealmakers, announcing plans in Q3 to purchase developer AI platform DX for $1 billion and AI browser developer The Browser Co. for $610 million. OpenAI was also a big spender, agreeing to pay $1.1 billion for product testing startup Stasig. Not slowing down The Q3 report is the latest of several quarterly synopses that showcase a robust startup funding scene, with plenty of cash available in particular for compelling AI upstarts. But it would be remiss to leave the impression that all sectors are seeing a rise. Biotech funding, for example, has been trending lower and accounting for a smaller share of total investment. These are also not bullish times for cleantech. On balance, however, it’s hard to deny that the general direction of investment has been trending higher. And so far, there’s little indication this part of the cycle is on the way out. Methodology The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data is as of Oct. 6, 2025. Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year. Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price. Glossary of funding terms Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less. Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million. Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round. Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.) Illustration: Dom Guzman
Startups And The Shutdown: When Your Primary Customer Folds Overnight
Government shutdowns usually land in the headlines as political theater: national parks closed, passport offices jammed, TSA lines stretching into eternity. Annoying, sure, but not existential for most people. For startups, though, this October’s shutdown is different. When your primary customer is Uncle Sam and he suddenly closes his checkbook, that isn’t politics — it’s survival. The U.S. government is the client for thousands of young companies, especially those in defense tech, climate tech, biotech and AI. A Pentagon pilot program, an NIH grant, an EPA loan guarantee — these aren’t just contracts. They’re lifelines that validate your product, unlock venture funding and keep the team paid. But contracts don’t mean much without appropriations. If the agency you’re working with doesn’t have authority to spend, the invoices sit in limbo. The most dangerous thing about a shutdown is that startups can do everything right — sign the deal, hit the milestones, file the paperwork — and still get left holding the bag. That plays out in the one metric founders obsess over: runway. Most early-stage startups don’t have a year of cash just sitting there. If a big federal payment is frozen, it’s not just an accounting hiccup. It can cut months off survival time. Payroll suddenly looks dicey, milestones start slipping and investors get jumpy. One defense tech founder told me, “We can survive a late-paying Fortune 500 client. We can’t survive a silent Pentagon.” That’s the difference: Corporate clients might be slow, but they don’t disappear overnight because Congress got stuck in neutral. Government as gatekeeper And this isn’t just about cash flow. The government is also a gatekeeper. Need an FDA green light for your trial? Need the SBA to guarantee your loan? Need the SEC to review your filing? If staff are furloughed, those processes stall. That delay ripples. A biotech waiting on an FDA sign-off can lose an entire quarter of momentum. A climate startup waiting on a loan guarantee can watch investors walk. A fintech can’t move forward with an unanswered SEC question. In the startup world, where speed is survival, three months of dead air can be terminal. If this all sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Back in 2018–2019, when the shutdown dragged on for 35 days, NASA suspended small aerospace projects, NIH froze grants and the SBA stopped processing loans. Startups that leaned heavily on federal programs got walloped. A few pulled through by grabbing bridge financing or deferring expenses, but a lot of promising young companies simply ran out of oxygen. The ones that survived weren’t necessarily the best products — they were the ones whose founders had already gamed out what a shutdown meant for their business. That’s the reality investors are grilling founders on right now. If you’re pitching in October 2025, you’re going to get one question before anyone cares about your TAM or your roadmap: “How exposed are you to the shutdown?” Hand-waving won’t cut it. VCs want to see the actual scenarios: What happens to your cash if this drags on one month, three months, six months? How much revenue is locked up in frozen contracts? Do you have any commercial customers or international deals to balance it out? A lot of valuations in defense and climate tech are going to get haircuts not because the ideas aren’t good, but because the revenue dependency is too concentrated in Washington, D.C. What startup founders can do So what should founders do? First, over-communicate. Investors, employees and partners would much rather hear you acknowledge the risk than pretend everything’s fine. Second, conserve cash. Delay nonessential spending, stretch out hiring, get creative on expenses. Third, read your contracts carefully. Too many startups assume a signed agreement means money in the bank. It doesn’t if appropriations dry up. Know whether you can legally pause performance or if you’re on the hook to keep delivering with no payments coming in. And fourth, diversify where you can, even if it feels inefficient. The startups with at least some commercial or international revenue are the ones with a cushion when Washington freezes. Shutdowns also put the spotlight on something founders don’t like to think about: political risk. It’s not just noise on CNBC. It’s as real as supply chain delays or product-market fit. If shutdowns become a near-annual bargaining chip, the whole pitch about the government being a “stable anchor customer” starts to crumble. For Lockheed Martin, a shutdown is an inconvenience. For a 12-person startup in Arlington, it’s life or death. And if startups start backing away from government deals because they can’t stomach the uncertainty, that’s bad for everyone — especially the government, which needs their innovation in defense, AI and climate more than ever. This is where resilience comes in. A shutdown isn’t a founder’s fault, but surviving one is part of the job. The smart teams are treating this as both a financial and legal challenge. They’re cutting burn, talking openly with investors, stress-testing scenarios, and yes, even calling lawyers about whether they can file declaratory judgments or push agencies for clarity. None of that is fun, but it’s better than waiting around and hoping Congress figures it out. The bottom line is simple: political risk is business risk. When your primary customer folds overnight, it doesn’t matter how brilliant your tech is or how slick your deck looks. What matters is whether you’ve built a company resilient enough to survive the silence until Washington switches back on. For now, the shutdown is only days old. Courts are still open, agencies are quiet, and founders are refreshing their bank dashboards like always. But the lesson is already obvious. Startups can’t afford to treat shutdowns as background noise anymore. They’re a line item in your financial model, a question in every term sheet, and a reality you have to plan around. If you don’t, the government might not be the only thing shutting down this fall. Aron Solomon is the chief strategy officer for Amplify. He holds a law degree and has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. His writing has been featured in Newsweek, The Hill, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, CBS News, CNBC, USA Today and many other publications. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his op-ed in The Independent exposing the NFL’s “race-norming” policies. Illustration: Dom Guzman
Exclusive: Fintech Decacorn Ramp Acquires Jolt AI to Help Its Engineers ‘Build Faster’
Expense management startup Ramp has acquired the team of a three-person startup called Jolt AI with the intent of making its engineers “as productive as possible,” the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively. While a relatively small acquisition, the deal is significant in that it’s representative of the role that artificial intelligence is playing in many of the fastest-growing venture-backed startups — even those that aren’t necessarily strictly AI companies. New York-based fintech Ramp is definitely among that rapidly growing bunch, having achieved a valuation of $22.5 billion, as well as annualized revenue of $1 billion, in 2025. That’s up from a valuation of $13 billion just a few months earlier in March, as well as an increase from annualized revenue of $700 million as of January. The company says it began “generating cash flow” earlier this year. Jolt AI has raised just under $2.5 million in funding since its 2022 inception from investors such as Alumni Ventures, 8-Bit Capital and Engineering Capital. The startup initially was a load-testing platform before pivoting in 2024 to launch an AI coding assistant for large production-scale code, according to CEO and founder Yev Spektor. More startups buying startups Besides being strategic for Ramp, the acquisition is also representative of an uptick in the number of startups buying other startups. In the first three quarters of 2025, there were 647 reported M&A deals globally in which startups bought other startups, according to Crunchbase data. That compares to 539 in the same period last year, a 20% increase. For comparison’s sake, in the full years 2021 and 2022, there were nearly 1,000 deals in which startups bought other startups, per Crunchbase data. ‘Making engineers radically more productive’Yev Spektor (left) and Karim Atiyeh. [courtesy photo] “The need for both of those is even more important now with AI and agentic work taking hold in finance,” he said. He claims that thanks in part to AI, Ramp customers can get 3x more done in Ramp today than they could just two years ago. “And in the next two years we want that to be 30x,” Atiyeh said. “We think the way to get there is by focusing on AI and agentic workflows, making Ramp’s platform dramatically more powerful. We’re focused on hiring the best engineering talent there is to make this happen and then, importantly, making our engineers as productive as possible.” That’s what got him so excited about the Jolt team. Their entire focus, Atiyeh said, “is on making engineers radically more productive — helping them ship faster.” Jolt AI’s 2024 pivot proved to be the right move. So much so in fact that the CEO of one of its early customers introduced the small startup to Atiyeh and Ramp earlier this year. And the rest, as they say, is history. Ramp’s purchase, notably, involved only the company’s three-person team, and not its product. “Jolt is a team of world-class engineers who have spent years solving some of the hardest problems in developer productivity,” Atiyeh said. “They’re now bringing that expertise to Ramp’s developer tools and beyond. I’m most excited to see what their team can do within Ramp, so that’s what this deal was focused on.” Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. Ramping up Today, Ramp has more than 45,000 customers, up from over 30,000 in early March. Those customers include Shopify, Anduril Industries, Notion, Cursor, CBRE, Stripe, Poshmark, ZipRecruiter, Olipop, Glossier and Construction One, among others. Presently, Ramp has 1,200 employees. The Jolt team — made up of Spektor, Jon Reynolds (CTO) and Carlos Kelly (principal engineer) — will integrate into Ramp’s engineering platform team with a “core focus on helping engineers build faster.” “They’re going to do this by strengthening our core AI platform and infrastructure, supercharging our dev experience, and transforming product and tooling with applied AI,” Atiyeh said. The trio is also going to be working on Ramp’s AI and agentic products for its customers, he added. It’s not the first time that Ramp has acquired AI-related companies. In 2023, it picked up Cohere in an effort to accelerate AI-powered customer support. And in 2024, it acquired Venue to automate procurement workflows. “From a talent perspective, Ramp’s engineering team is made up of founders, math olympiads, and AI researchers,” Atiyeh told Crunchbase News. “… My goal is to hire elite technical talent, and then get out of their way.” For his part, Jolt’s Spektor admitted in an interview that he didn’t expect to get acquired by a company like Ramp, but that he’s “extremely happy” it is where his team landed. The trio will be working on a number of things including Ramp’s internal engineering platform. “Some of that does involve AI tooling. Our whole goal is to make sure engineers are as fast and effective as possible,” Spektor said. “And on the customer-facing side of things, there’s a lot of development around bringing AI agents and features to financial workflows. So we’ll be helping out in that department as well.” Bottom line, according to Atiyeh, AI is changing the way Ramp uses and builds software. “With the Jolt team on board, we’re doubling down on both fronts,” Atiyeh wrote in a blog post, “building the internal AI devtools that help our engineers ship at high velocity, and creating products that save finance teams time and money at scale.” Over the years, Ramp has built a name for itself in the corporate card and expense management space. It’s branched out into travel, bill pay, and, in January, released a new treasury product that had it encroaching into digital bank territory. Its latest acquisition is in line with what experts are seeing in 2025. Earlier this year, Lindsey S. Mignano, co-founder of SSM Law, noted an interesting trend she’s seeing: more asset acquisitions plus acqui-hires. She said one reason for that increase is a rush to market, most particularly in the extremely competitive AI field and with companies who have incorporated AI in their offerings.. Indeed, Ramp operates in an extremely competitive space against the likes of Navan – which recently filed an S-1 to go public despite being far from profitable – Mercury and Brex. In an Oct. 2 blog post, Brex CEO and co-founder Pedro Franceschi wrote that his company “was operating cash flow positive for the first time in history.” Since its 2019 inception, New York-based Ramp says it has raised a total of $1.9 billion in equity funding. Investors include Iconiq Capital, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Stripe, Citi, Lux Capital and Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV (formerly Google Ventures), T. Rowe Price and Operator Collective. Related Crunchbase queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Q3 Venture Funding Jumps 38% As More Massive Rounds Go To AI Giants And Exits Gain Steam
Global venture funding gained significantly in Q3 2025, closing up 38% year over year, Crunchbase data shows, as massive funding deals, particularly for giants in the AI sector, continued to lead. All told, Q3 venture investment reached $97 billion, up from $70 billion in Q3 2024, per Crunchbase data. Quarter-over-quarter funding was up slightly from $92 billion in Q2. In each of the past four quarters, global startup funding has been above $90 billion — quarterly amounts not seen since Q3 2022 — Crunchbase data shows. Startup investment has also now posted a year-over-year increase for the past four quarters, driven by megarounds of $500 million or more, largely to AI-related companies. Table of Contents Capital concentration As funding has increased this year, so has capital concentration. Over the past four quarters, venture investment has concentrated into rounds of $500 million or more, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows, with more than 30% of funding each quarter going toward such megarounds. The three largest venture rounds in Q3 2025 were raised by foundation model companies Anthropic ($13 billion), xAI ($5.3 billion) and Mistral AI ($2 billion). Billion-dollar-plus funding deals also went to Princeton Digital Group, Nscale, Cerebras Systems, Figure, Databricks and PsiQuantum. All in all, a third of all venture investment in Q3 went to just 18 companies that raised funding rounds of $500 million or more each. That is well above historical proportions before Q4 2024. Megaround funding also gained steam as the quarter progressed, with 11 of the 18 companies raising funding in September. AI leads In another blockbuster quarter for AI funding, $45 billion — or around 46% of global venture funding — went to the sector, with 29% invested in a single company, Anthropic. Hardware was the second-largest sector, with large rounds raised by robotic, semiconductor, quantum and data infrastructure companies in the third quarter totaling $16.2 billion, per Crunchbase data. The healthcare and biotech sector raised $15.8 billion in venture funding in Q3, making it the third-largest sector for the quarter. Financial services, the fourth-largest sector, raised $12 billion in total. Along with a greater concentration of capital in larger companies, the U.S. predominated, with $60 billion — or just under two-thirds of global venture capital — going to U.S.-based companies in Q3. Late-stage funding up YoY Most of the third quarter’s year over year gains were in late-stage funding. Late-stage investment in Q3 totaled $58 billion, up more than 66% year over year, and slightly higher quarter over quarter, Crunchbase data shows. (The peak quarter for late-stage funding in 2025 was Q1, with the $40 billion round for OpenAI significantly boosting the numbers.) Early stage slightly up Early-stage funding totaled nearly $30 billion for more than 1,700 companies in Q3, Crunchbase data shows. That’s up just over 10% quarter over quarter and year over year. Larger Series A and B rounds were raised by companies working on AI data workloads, energy, quantum, robotics, biotech and AI applications. Seed increases Seed funding reached $9 billion in Q3 across more than 3,500 companies. Seed funding was up slightly from $8.5 billion invested a year ago. (Seed funding totals also typically increase over time, as many seed rounds are added to the Crunchbase dataset after the close of a quarter.) Strong exit activity in Q3 2025 For the second quarter in a row, IPO activity increased year over year. The largest venture-backed IPOs in Q3 by value were Chery Automobile, Figma, Klarna and Netskope. On a global basis, 16 venture-backed companies went public above $1 billion in Q3, collectively valued north of $90 billion at their IPO prices. That compares to 18 companies in Q2 with a collective $60 billion in value. Both quarters were up significantly from 2024. In Q3 2025, M&A dollar volume reached $27.5 billion in reported exit value for venture-backed companies, Crunchbase data shows. That’s down from $43.6 billion in Q2. Nine companies were acquired for more than $1 billion each in Q3, Crunchbase data shows. Four of the companies were in healthcare and biotech. The remainder were in sectors including cybersecurity, AI, financial services, product development and sports betting. Notable among these was OpenAI’s acquisition of Statsig and Workday’s acquisition of Sana. Methodology The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data is as of Oct. 2, 2025. Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year. Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price. Glossary of funding terms Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less. Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million. Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round. Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.) Illustration: Dom Guzman