Since our last mapping in March 2025, the landscape has exploded from roughly 300 players to thousands as tech companies race to launch AI agent offerings across horizontal use cases and industry applications.

Agentic solutions have become a leading acquisition target for enterprise software incumbents, while 1 in 5 new unicorns ($1B+ valuation) are now developing agents.

To help navigate this expansion, we mapped 400+ promising private companies building AI agent applications.

Track 1,700+ AI agent companies

We selected companies for inclusion based on Mosaic startup health and potential scores (600+). We included private companies only with agent offerings and organized them according to their primary focus. This market map is not exhaustive of the space. For companies building infrastructure for agents, see our AI agent tech stack.

Please click to enlarge.

Want to be considered for future AI agent research? Brief our analysts to ensure we have the most up-to-date data on your company.

Here’s what today’s AI agent landscape signals about the future of tech:

• The private AI agent market is moving towards greater specialization. Horizontal AI agent startups outnumber verticalized solutions nearly 2-1 in the landscape. However, since we last published the map, industry-specific solutions have surged. This iteration features 47 companies in the healthcare & life sciences category, up from 7 in March. Partly behind the surge are commercially mature private companies launching agent offerings (or rebranding) to meet the moment. At the same time, emerging startups (see our analysis of Y Combinator’s recent batches here and here) are betting that highly regulated industries will favor specialized solutions over horizontal tools. 
• Leading AI agent companies are growing revenue at lightning speed, with the top 20 revenue leaders (with agents as a primary product) averaging just 3.8 years old. Software development leads revenue activity with 6 coding agents making the top rankings including Anysphere (Cursor) and Replit. This market is the most crowded on the map, reflecting the value agents bring to well-defined workflows and testable environments. But it’s also facing challenges as reasoning models drive higher inference costs, previewing the pricing pressures other agent categories will face. CB Insights customers can dig into revenue data for the full AI agent & copilot landscape with this search. 
• AI agent startups focused on cybersecurity operations are most primed to exit, based on average CB Insights M&A probability scores. Nullify (autonomous agents for application security) and Strike Ready (AI-powered SOC platform) top the list with 70%+ probability of getting acquired within the next two years. AI-related cybersecurity M&A (both for AI security solutions and AI-powered solutions) has already reached record levels in 2025 so far. Cyber leaders are snapping up competitors to keep up with an evolving attack surface. 

Methodology & category notes

Companies profiled on the map are working on various levels of autonomy, from agentic, LLM-powered workflows to fully autonomous agents.

These agents combine reasoning (foundation models for decision-making), memory (information storage and retrieval), tool use (external system integration), and planning (task decomposition and adaptation) capabilities.

We excluded companies building agent-specific infrastructure, focusing on startups targeting core enterprise use cases and industry-specific workflows.

Companies were selected from a pool of over 1,700 based on their CB Insights Mosaic score. 

Mosaic score

Evaluates the overall health and growth potential of private companies based on performance, financial stability, market conditions, and management strength. It combines these factors into a single score (out of 1,000).

Enterprise tech

Click into each market to view the full description and market players on the CB Insights platform. 

This segment primarily features startups targeting enterprises, with industry-agnostic applications across job functions such as:

• Data analytics
• Coding
• Finance and accounting
• Sales
• Marketing
• Customer service
• Recruiting
• Security operations centers
• Legal (in-house)
• IT operations & support 

Companies in the productivity & personal assistants category are targeting consumers and employees directly across applications like research, time management, and other browser-based tasks. 

General workflow automation & knowledge management tools are one of the largest categories on the map, encompassing the AI agent builder platforms market, which offers no-code and low-code solutions for business users to automate workflows. 

Industry-specific 

This layer features companies catering to industry applications, including: 

• Financial services & insurance (e.g., investment research, loan servicing & collections, compliance workflows) 
• Healthcare & life sciences (e.g., revenue cycle management, clinical documentation, patient access)
• Industrials (e.g., manufacturing optimization, supply chain, construction)
• Retail & hospitality (e.g., shopping agents, website personalization, restaurant & hotel) 

FURTHER READING 

• The AI agent bible
• The AI agent tech stack
• The AI agent market map: March 2025 edition
• State of AI Q3’25

The post The AI agent market map appeared first on CB Insights Research.

To create the Tech IPO Pipeline, we scored companies across CBI datasets including Mosaic scores, hiring insights, revenues, exit probabilities, business relationships, and more.

Check out key highlights across the Tech IPO Pipeline below.

CBI customers: See these companies ranked by Mosaic and revenue

Combining CB Insights’ proprietary data and AI, scouting reports provide insight into each company’s:

• Funding history
• Headcount
• Key opportunities and threats
• IPO prospects
• Mosaic score

For customers, get the full book of 100+ scouting reports using the download button on the lefthand side.

MORE CB INSIGHTS RESEARCH:

• State of Venture Q3’25 Report
• Future Tech Hotshots: 2025: 45 emerging tech startups poised to make an outsized impact
• State of AI Q3’25 Report

For information on reprint rights or other inquiries, please contact reprints@cbinsights.com.

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While deals fell in Q3’25, billion-dollar rounds to AI infrastructure players continued to drive the funding surge. But the activity isn’t limited to the largest players: investors are cutting bigger checks across every stage, signaling both conviction in AI’s potential and the high costs of AI development.

Among emerging opportunities, AI agents are a key focus for VCs and enterprises alike, with agent markets leading deal and M&A activity in the quarter.

Below, we break down the top stories from this quarter’s report, including:

• AI deal activity softens, but massive rounds support continued funding boom
• Consolidation remains in full force in the AI market
• Tech market deals highlight AI agent applications, rise of GEO
• The talent premium: AI companies valued at up to ~$100M per employee

Download the full report to access comprehensive CB Insights data and charts on the evolving state of AI across geographies.

AI deal activity softens, but massive rounds support continued funding boom

Deals to private AI companies globally fell 22% quarter-over-quarter in Q3’25, but funding remained above $45B for the fourth consecutive quarter.

Taken together, these trends indicate how top-heavy the AI venture funding landscape has become. 

The average deal size in 2025 YTD is $49.3M — up 86% from 2024. In the last 4 quarters, mega-rounds ($100M+ deals) have accounted for 75%+ funding. The average since 2021 (up to Q3’24) is 53%. 

At the same time, check sizes are trending bigger at the median across every stage this year. For example, the median early-stage deal is $3.4M in 2025 YTD, up from $2.5M in 2024. 

Investors are funneling capital into fewer, larger bets on perceived AI winners, driven by the massive infrastructure costs and competitive dynamics of foundation model development.

In Q3’25, there were 6 $1B+ rounds alone. The top 3 deals went to LLM developers — Anthropic ($13B, Series F), OpenAI ($8.3B, PE), and Mistral AI ($1.5B, Series C) — reflecting the high cost of frontier model development. While OpenAI hit $12B in annualized revenue in July 2025, it’s projecting roughly $8B in cash burn this year per reports. 

Other infrastructure players like Nscale (AI data centers, $1.1B Series B) and Groq (AI inference processors, $750M, Series E) were also in the top 10. The raises are indicative of the growth and attention technologies enabling AI are receiving, with earnings call mentions of data centers hitting record levels in Q3’25 and AI training & inference chips on track for record equity deal & funding activity this year.

Consolidation remains in full force in the AI market

The AI market is a hotbed for M&A activity. 

Q3’25 marks the second highest quarter on record for AI startup M&A (172 deals), following Q2’25 (181 deals). The US continues to gain share, with startups based in the country accounting for 59% of total exits, the highest share since Q2’21. 

Three of the top 5 exits in the quarter were related to AI agents: 

• Workday acquired Sana Labs, a company focused on enterprise workflows, for $1.1B. 
• NiCE acquired customer support startup Cognigy for $955M. 
• Atlassian acquired The Browser Company, the maker of the Arc and Dia AI browsers, for $610M. 

The activity signals enterprise software incumbents are looking to buy their way into accelerating their AI roadmaps. Workday was the second most active acquirer in the quarter with 3 acquisitions (behind Salesforce, with 4 acquisitions). The HR & finance software company also picked up agent builder Flowise and AI-powered recruiting platform Paradox.

Meanwhile, Meta made its first publicly disclosed acquisitions since 2022, acquiring voice AI startups Play AI and WaveForms AI.

Other notable top exits include AI security companies Lakera (acquired by Check Point for $300M) and Prompt Security (acquired by SentinelOne for $250M-$300M). Generative AI is expanding attack surfaces, driving large cyber players to opt for M&A to more quickly integrate AI security features into existing offerings.

Both Lakera and Prompt Security were founded less than 5 years ago, far “younger” than the average time to exit of 9.7 years in the quarter, underscoring how rapidly AI security has become mission-critical.

Review the AI security startups that are ripe for acquisition next in this brief.

Tech market deals highlight AI agent applications, rise of GEO

Among the 1,500+ tech markets that CB Insights tracks, those in the chart below saw the greatest number of AI deals in Q3’25 (note: companies may appear in multiple markets).

Industrial humanoid robot developers and coding AI agents & copilots remained at the top, while LLM developers also climbed back up in the rankings from Q2’25.  

One notable rising market is generative engine optimization (GEO), which refers to tools that help brands optimize their visibility in AI search platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity. This emerging category (the most nascent in the list based on CBI Commercial Maturity scores) addresses the shift toward shopping and discovery happening on top of LLM interfaces.

OpenAI’s September 2025 launch of in-platform shopping capabilities in ChatGPT underscores this trend, establishing AI platforms as new commerce channels requiring specialized optimization strategies.

Using CB Insights’ Mosaic score — which measures private company health and predicts likelihood of success — we analyzed more than 20 GEO companies, ranking them by 1-year Mosaic score growth to identify the fastest-rising vendors. 

See the GEO partners best positioned to help brands win in AI search here. 

The talent premium: AI companies valued at up to ~$100M per employee

AI companies with lean headcounts and breakthrough potential are attracting sky-high valuations.

Humanoid robotics developer Figure leads the pack in Q3’25 at $104.3M per employee on a $39B valuation, despite reporting no revenue last year (though projecting $9B by 2029). Cognition follows with $98.1M per employee, based on its $10.2B valuation. While the coding AI agent startup has $150M+ in ARR (following its acquisition of Windsurf), this indicates a lofty revenue multiple of ~68x. 

Others topping the quarter’s valuation-per-employee list span the AI model (Anthropic, Mistral AI, Decart, Harmonic), infrastructure (Baseten), and application layers (OpenEvidence,  Sierra, Irregular). 

Whether these valuations prove prescient or overextended will largely depend on whether these companies can deliver on ambitious revenue projections in the years ahead.

RELATED RESOURCES FROM CB INSIGHTS:

• State of Venture Q3’25 Report
• State of Fintech Q3’25 Report
• State of AI Q2’25 Report
• State of Digital Health Q2’25 Report
• State of Tech Exits H1’25

The post State of AI Q3’25 Report appeared first on CB Insights Research.

This cohort cuts through the noise to spotlight 45 companies we expect to have an outsized, lasting impact over the next 5-10 years — from AI infrastructure that powers autonomous enterprise systems to vertical AI applications in healthcare, financial services, and manufacturing that solve operational problems.

Using CB Insights’ proprietary data — including Commercial Maturity, Mosaic, patents, business relationships, and funding — we identified 45 emerging players most likely to have a strong exit in the next 5-10 years.

See every startup in the Future Tech Hotshots 2025 Expert Collection

Key takeaways

• Agent infrastructure is the new frontier. The cohort reveals a decisive bet on agentic AI, with startups like Coval (AI agent testing), Questflow (multi-agent orchestration), and Syncari (agentic master data management) building the foundational tools that enable autonomous AI to operate reliably at scale. These companies are positioned for outsized impact because they’re creating the critical layer to embed AI into workflows — just as cloud infrastructure enabled SaaS, agent infrastructure will enable the next wave of autonomous enterprise software.

• The 45 hotshots have collectively formed over 110 business relationships since 2024. LLM data preparation company LlamaIndex leads the pack (18 partnerships), having partnered with incumbents like Microsoft and Databricks, while blockchain infrastructure API startup Crossmint has forged partnerships with Visa (to enable AI-driven on-chain payments) and Moneygram (to power new stablecoin cross-border payment experience). As these startups scale over the next 5–10 years, this early validation with enterprise incumbents will become harder to displace as customers build workflows around their products.

• Industrial AI is the most promising area, with companies in this space having experienced the highest Mosaic score increase over the last 6 months. This includes GIS platform Felt (+71 points in 6 months) and humanoid developer Persona AI (+57). This momentum reflects investor and customer recognition that industrial AI creates defensible moats through domain-specific datasets that take years to build. Unlike horizontal tools, this vertical expertise can’t be easily replicated, positioning these companies as prime acquisition targets for industrial incumbents seeking AI capabilities over the next 5-10 years.

• Elite management teams cluster in enterprise infrastructure. Top Management Mosaic scores concentrate in enterprise tech, with Lineaje (962/1000; software supply chain security platform), Maven AGI (956/1000; customer service AI agents), ProRata.ai (950/1000; AI-powered search and advertising), and Harmonic (876/1000; mathematical superintelligence) all led by executives hailing from incumbents like Google, Robinhood, and Stripe. These companies signal that the most experienced founders see enterprise infrastructure — not verticalized or consumer AI — as the category where technical depth and execution create the most competitive advantage.

Methodology

We used CB Insights data to analyze hundreds of VC-backed private tech companies with Mosaic scores of 600+ and an early commercial maturity score. 

Our scoring model factors in signals like investor quality, business relationships, Mosaic scores, key people data, and patents. We excluded companies with fewer than 100 employees. Data is as of 9/29/2025.

For information on reprint rights or other inquiries, please contact reprints@cbinsights.com. 

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To no surprise, AI is at the forefront of these changes. The tech is no longer confined to chatbots or data analysis; it now executes real financial workflows, from compliance reviews to transaction monitoring. Crypto’s story is maturing in parallel and moving away from speculation, as stablecoins, custody platforms, and tokenization become part of everyday financial operations for businesses and institutions alike.

This year’s Fintech 100 highlights the companies poised to lead this transformation. We selected the 100 winners from over 15,000 companies using deal activity, industry partnerships, investor strength, hiring momentum, and CB Insights’ predictive scores for success (Mosaic Scores) and commercial traction (Commercial Maturity).

This year’s cohort spans 26 countries with a record 60 winners outside the US. The winners have an average Mosaic score of 775 (top 2% of private companies) and are scaling fast with 61% average headcount growth over the past year vs. the fintech average of 13%.

Below, we map out the winners, categorizing them based on their core offering. Customers can track all 100 companies in this Expert Collection. Key trends follow. 

Please click to enlarge. Data as of 10/23/25.

CBI customers: Get data on the winners

Key takeaways on the Fintech 100

1. AI agents are tackling specialized financial workflows, from debt collection to autonomous payments.

Eleven companies on this year’s Fintech 100 are enabling AI agents, automating tasks from fraud detection to financial planning. They span 8 of the 14 categories, showing how agents’ impact is permeating across sectors in financial services.

While horizontal AI agent platforms have dominated investment activity in the broader landscape, these companies are carving out niches by building agents for specific financial workflows. For example: 

• Borderless’s agent Alberni, launched with LLM developer Cohere, automates global employment and payroll.
• Anti-money laundering (AML) software company Greenlite’s agents accelerate AML reviews.
• Debt collection platform Murphy reports 40% higher recovery rates using agentic models.

Beyond workflow automation, several companies are developing payment infrastructure for AI agents. Catena Labs is building agentic payments rails that will enable users to authorize AI agents to transact on their behalf. Its backers include Coinbase’s and Circle’s venture arms. Circle has also backed Crossmint, which is developing a wallet on the blockchain that will allow agents to hold funds and make independent purchases. 

The trajectory is clear: specialized agentic solutions will continue to reach into every layer of financial services. 

2. AI is automating the core of enterprise finance as financial operations platforms expand into full-stack ecosystems.

Seventeen companies on this year’s Fintech 100 — up from ten in 2024 — are using AI to take over accounting, payroll, and treasury workflows once managed manually. The result is faster close cycles, cleaner data, and finance teams that operate with real-time visibility across the business.

Fintech 100 leaders are deploying AI to handle complex, repetitive financial tasks:

• Campfire’s AI-powered ERP replacement achieves 95% accuracy on financial reconciliations.
• Xelix’s agents detect fraud, prevent overpayments, and automate supplier queries.
• Niural’s agent EMMA runs global payroll across 150 countries.

At the same time, payroll and financial operations providers are layering in adjacent financial services — salary access, digital banking, and cross-border payments — to create integrated workforce finance platforms. 

• Khazna offers earned wage access for underbanked employees in Egypt and Saudi Arabia
• InstaPay collects digital salaries and remittances for migrant workers in Malaysia. 
• Every includes incorporation, banking, and benefits management within its payroll suite.  

These moves show how payroll is becoming the anchor for embedded finance. Global providers such as Workday, Gusto, and Deel are accelerating this shift through acquisitions and new product extensions.

As AI takes on more financial decisioning and compliance tasks, financial operations platforms are evolving into self-updating systems that can reconcile, forecast, and route payments automatically — turning finance from a reactive function into a continuous, data-driven process.

3. Digital asset companies are enabling crypto in everyday transactions and institutional finance.

Crypto payments infrastructure and institutional DeFi together form the largest sector in this year’s Fintech 100, with momentum driven by unprecedented attention and activity in stablecoins, as well as regulatory tailwinds. 

Fintech 100 winners in crypto payments infrastructure are enabling the use of digital assets in day-to-day finance, from crypto card payments to enterprise transactions. On the enterprise side, BVNK, Rain, and Noah are building stablecoin payment rails, allowing businesses to transact with crypto more affordably, while Transak embeds crypto payments and fiat access directly into enterprise workflows. For consumers, RedotPay and Baanx are expanding access to crypto payments via Visa and Mastercard integrations.

As regulators greenlight digital asset use by traditional institutions, other Fintech 100 winners are building the infrastructure for banks and asset managers to hold, issue, and trade tokenized assets at scale:

• RD Technologies was admitted to Hong Kong’s stablecoin standbox and is partnering with ZA Bank to develop stablecoin use cases. 
• DigiFT, a dually-licensed Singapore-Hong Kong exchange for tokenized RWAs, expanded its partnership with UBS Asset Management on its Ethereum-based uMINT fund. 
• Komainu, a licensed custodian in the UK, Italy, and Dubai serving institutional investors raised $75M in Series B funding in January.

Expect incumbents to pursue deeper partnerships and acquisitions in digital assets as crypto-native firms build the next layer of global financial infrastructure.

Deep dive into all companies here

Mosaic scores from the 2025 Fintech 100 winners

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Now, our Book of Scouting Reports offers in-depth analysis on every single one of the Fintech 100 winners, from crypto payments infrastructure to embedded finance.

Combining CB Insights’ proprietary data and AI, scouting reports provide insight into each company’s:

• Funding history
• Headcount
• Key takeaways (including opportunities and threats)
• Commercial Maturity score
• Mosaic score

Download the book to see all 100 scouting reports.

The post Book of Scouting Reports: 2025’s Fintech 100 appeared first on CB Insights Research.

This summer, the accelerator that spotted OpenAI, Airbnb, and Stripe before they became household names focused its funding on the production-ready AI layer that incumbents will soon race to acquire or replicate.

For strategy teams, Y Combinator represents both a roadmap of where the venture landscape is heading and a curated list of potential acquisition targets, partners, and competitive threats. 

Using CB Insights, we mapped the 165+ companies in the Y Combinator’s 2025 Summer batch across 11 different categories. Then, we analyzed the cohort to make predictions about what this means for the future of enterprise AI. 

Please click to enlarge.

Note: Categories are not mutually exclusive. For more, see the Y Combinator Summer Batch 2025 Expert Collection here. 

Track the 165+ startups in Y Combinator’s newest cohort

Key Takeaways  

• Voice AI is expanding into regulated industries. 16 companies in the batch are building specialized voice AI systems across use cases. Beyond just consumer assistants (April, Blue), startups in this batch are producing enterprise-grade systems managing complex, regulated interactions, notably in financial services (Altur, Veritus Agent, Qualify.bot, Wayline) — where compliance barriers are highest. Meanwhile, startups like Liva AI and Panels are building voice training data, as proprietary datasets that general-purpose models can’t replicate, creating defensive moats for companies employing voice AI.

• Startups are pushing deeper into software development with specialized solutions. With 20 software development companies in this summer’s Y Combinator batch, the category represents the largest, with coding agents still showing the strongest revenue traction among all AI agent types. However, new entrants are expanding beyond the code generation that enterprises already use. For example, Stagewise (frontend agents for codebases) and Interfere (autonomous de-bugging) are moving beyond just code generation to handle the complete development lifecycle, from writing production-ready code to testing on physical hardware. 

• Y Combinator is betting on the full agent stack, signaling the technology has moved from experimentation to implementation. Nearly 50% of YC’s Summer 2025 cohort offers AI agents, with 14 of those companies focusing specifically on agent infrastructure needed for deployment — spanning agent evaluation (AgentHub), de-bugging (Fulcrum Research), and monitoring (Mohi). Meanwhile, startups like Nozomio Labs (building context augmentation layers for agents) and Imprezia (creating AI-native ad networks) are pushing beyond traditional tooling into novel applications. As agents become table stakes for enterprises, infrastructure tools will become increasingly critical for building and managing reliability and performance at scale.
• The AI infrastructure focus is shifting from capability to efficiency. Companies like Stellon Labs (tiny frontier models for edge devices), Herdora (low-latency GPU inference for voice AI), and DeepAware AI (AI data center energy optimization) signal that deployment constraints — not model performance — are now the primary barrier to AI adoption. Solutions focusing on efficiency constraints like latency, energy costs, and edge deployment are critical for commercial AI deployment.

The post Y Combinator’s 2025 Summer Batch reveals focus on production-ready AI appeared first on CB Insights Research.

The surge was fueled by outsized mega-rounds to new decacorns — companies with $10B+ valuations — and the continued dominance of AI, which accounted for 51% of all funding and 22% of deals in Q3’25.

However, funding growth was far from uniform across sectors. Retail and healthcare saw quarterly declines, while fintech remained flat. The data suggests that investors are pulling back from traditional industries and doubling down on emerging technologies, especially AI.

Below, we break down the top stories from this quarter’s report, including:

• Funding surpassed $90B for the 4th consecutive quarter
• AI is on track to capture over 50% of total annual venture funding for the first time 
• Decacorns raise record funding, as quarterly tech mega-rounds reach a new high
• Humanoid robots captured the most deals for the 2nd quarter in a row
• Exits are rebounding despite companies staying private longer

Let’s dive in.

Download the full report to access comprehensive data and charts on the evolving state of venture across sectors, geographies, and more.

Top stories in Q3’25

1. Funding surpassed $90B for the 4th consecutive quarter

Venture funding exceeded $90B for the fourth consecutive quarter, reaching $95.6B in Q3’25. The year-to-date total surpassed $310B, marking the highest annual figure since 2022.

Deal count, however, fell to its lowest point since Q4’16, underscoring an ongoing trend: investors are writing bigger checks to fewer companies. This pattern has persisted for over a year.

AI maintained its stronghold on the venture market, capturing $47.8B in Q3, for 50% of total funding and 22% of deals. Both figures represent the second-highest quarterly levels on record, confirming AI as the primary driver of venture strength.

While the largest rounds of the quarter went to leading AI players, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, other standout fundraisers included:

• China Fusion Energy, which raised $1.6B to advance fusion reactor engineering and commercialization.
• DBG Health raised $1B to provide a range of healthcare services.
• PsiQuantum, a developer of photonic quantum computers, raised a $1B Series E round.

Investors are also fueling a resurgence in hard tech — particularly in aerospace, defense, and advanced computing: 

• Aerospace funding reached $14.1B through Q3’25 and is expected to reach $18.9B by year-end — surpassing its 2021 record by 20%. 
• Defense tech raised a record $13.7B, driving the emergence of a new military-startup complex. 
• Quantum computing tripled its previous annual funding record, reaching $3.7B.

The data points to a venture market in transition — one defined by larger checks, fewer deals, and a growing concentration of capital in AI and hard tech.

2. AI is on track to capture over 50% of total annual venture funding for the first time

AI companies are capturing a record share of funding and deals this year, at 51% of funding and 22% of deals. They also claimed 7 of the 10 largest rounds this quarter.

The US is proving especially dominant in AI, attracting 85% of total AI funding and 53% of deals in 2025. Four of the 7 largest rounds this quarter were based in the US: Anthropic, OpenAI, Databricks, and Figure.

Funding to AI-enabled companies is also taking a significant share of traditional sectors:

• Retail tech declined to $5.4B, its lowest quarter since Q3’24, with AI startups raising 36% of annual funding.
• Digital health fell to $4.5B, marking its weakest quarter since Q4’24, with AI startups representing 63% of the sector so far this year.
• Fintech remained flat at $10.9B quarterly, with AI firms accounting for 23% of total fintech funding in Q3’25, its 2nd highest quarter on record.

AI is creating a clear split in the venture ecosystem, with AI startups capturing an outsized share of capital and mega-rounds, while non-AI startups face tighter funding conditions.

The rapid rise in AI valuations raises questions about long-term sustainability, as many companies are priced for winner-take-all outcomes across categories, particularly in saturated markets like coding agents & copilots, where dozens of similar startups compete as margins tighten.

The current environment reflects a flight to quality. While AI continues to drive momentum and capital concentration, the market is gradually shifting toward fundamentals — where execution and efficiency, not just promise, will determine which companies justify their valuations.

3. Decacorns raise record funding, as quarterly tech mega-rounds reach a new high

The venture landscape is moving beyond unicorns to decacorns — companies valued at $10B or more. Decacorns raised a record $94.5B through Q3’25, surpassing the previous record of $46.3B in 2024.

However, the number of decacorn deals is almost half as much as it was in 2021 when it reached $45.5B — from 60 deals to 32 this year — revealing the high funding concentration among the very largest companies — primarily leading AI startups.

AI leaders raising at decacorn valuations include developers xAI, Scale, and Perplexity, defense startups Anduril and Helsing, and fintech company Ramp.

Beyond decacorns, $100M+ mega-rounds for tech companies also hit record levels. September saw 52 tech mega-rounds in total, with 70% of capital allocated to companies focused on making AI infrastructure more affordable at scale.

Many AI infrastructure companies that raised mega-rounds in Q3’25 have already generated substantial revenue. Invisible Technologies reached $134M in 2024, Baseten reportedly grew 10x YoY, while Rebellions projected $72M in revenue. This shift separates real businesses from overvalued concepts as scrutiny intensifies.

Decacorns and mega-rounds are defining the current venture landscape. The market is bifurcating not only between AI companies and the rest, but also between decacorns and mega-round recipients vs. everyone else.

We expect the gap between well-funded companies and the rest of the venture ecosystem to continue widening as capital concentrates among market leaders who are building critical infrastructure and enterprise solutions.

4. Humanoid robots captured the most deals for the 2nd quarter in a row

AI markets dominated the most active deals in Q3’25, including AI-powered humanoids, AI software applications, and autonomous driving. 

Industrial humanoid robots captured 17 deals — more than any other market — continuing momentum from Q2’25, when it also led with 23 deals. New humanoid robot unicorns also emerged — Zhiyuan Robot and Unitree Robotics — bringing the total to 4.

Humanoid deal activity extended outside of the industrial sector in Q3. Healthcare humanoid robots secured 7 deals, ranking just outside of the top 10 markets. Figure led both the industrial and healthcare humanoid markets, raising a $1B Series C round at a $39B valuation, making it the 9th most valuable private company globally.

Investor interest in humanoid robots is driven partly by physical AI enabling new robotics capabilities, giving humanoids commercial promise that was not previously possible.

But despite deal activity and future potential, humanoids remain years away from widespread deployment. Developers still face fundamental challenges with inference, dexterity, reliability, and cost, which limit initial use cases to structured environments like factories and warehouses with a controlled and predictable set of tasks.

Autonomous driving showed particular strength among markets powered by physical AI. Both autonomous trucking systems and autonomous driving systems captured 8 deals each, ranking among the most active markets by deal count, alongside prominent AI categories such as coding AI agents, AI agent development platforms, and LLM developers.

5. Exits are rebounding despite companies staying private longer

Exits are recovering, but the numbers also reveal a fundamental shift in how long startups remain private before going public or getting acquired.

M&A and IPO activity both rebounded in Q3’25, partly driven by maturing AI startups that created more exit opportunities. M&A deals rose 8% from last quarter to 2,324 — the highest total since Q3’22. AI M&A activity remained elevated at 172 deals, contributing to the increase.

Fintech M&A contributed heavily to the rebound, rising to 249 deals — its highest level since Q1’22. Healthcare M&A also hit its strongest level since Q1’23, with 3 of the top 10 M&A transactions going to healthcare companies.

IPO activity climbed 45% from 95 to 138 — the highest quarterly total since Q3’23. AI and fintech contributed to the uptick, but software companies dominated the largest offerings. The biggest IPOs went to Figma and Klarna. The only hardware exception was China-based Best Semi, a semiconductor equipment manufacturer.

The Q3 exit rebound reflects improving conditions and suggests a broader recovery ahead, especially if interest rates continue to decline.

Despite increased exit activity, companies are staying private longer, with the time to exit rising from 12.2 years in 2015 to 15.9 years in 2025.

The ability to raise at decacorn valuations while staying private removes the pressure to go public for capital. Companies can now scale to a massive size, hire top talent through liquid secondary markets, and maintain founder control — all without the quarterly earnings pressure or regulatory burdens associated with going public.

Exit levels are recovering, suggesting that the market is normalizing, but the structural shift toward longer private tenures is likely to remain. The venture lifecycle is undergoing a fundamental change, with companies now possessing viable paths to scale privately that did not exist a decade ago.

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RELATED RESOURCES FROM CB INSIGHTS:

• State of Venture Q2’25 Report
• State of Fintech Q3’25 Report
• State of AI Q2’25 Report
• State of Digital Health Q2’25 Report
• State of Insurtech Q2’25 Report
• State of Tech Exits H1’25

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In September, private companies globally raised 1,400+ early-stage rounds (noting this total will rise as more deals are published retroactively). Over 25% of startups that raised rounds are building AI-enabled products and services.

Download the full report to access comprehensive CB Insights data on early-stage activity, including top investors & deals, valuation data, and our predictive signals. Below, we highlight notable trends to watch.

Emerging trends & categories to watch

Click the links to see underlying deal activity. Categories are not mutually exclusive. 

Review the full deal dataset

AI agents

Similar to last month, companies targeting AI agent applications raised over 50 deals (out of 1,485). Key trends to note include: 

• “Smart Money” is all in on AI agents: The top 25 VCs identified by CB Insights backed 13 AI agent startups in September. This represents nearly 20% of all of the early-stage activity from these VCs in the month. Focuses include security (Akto, Fabrix Security, Terra Security) and governance, risk, and compliance (Geordie, Zania), indicating enterprise adoption and risk management are key investment priorities. 
• Customer service is one of the most established use cases but is still seeing early-stage traction: AI agents handling customer service, support tickets, and user interactions represent one of the largest early-stage agent categories in September (8+ deals). Support operations have clear unit economics, high volume repetitive tasks, and direct cost savings compared to human agents, driving continued activity here. Top companies to watch based on Mosaic scores include Doo (Mosaic: 747) and Rauda AI (Mosaic: 687). 
• Emerging voice AI sector: Voice and phone agents are attracting dedicated investment (6 deals, 11% of agent activity) as investors bet on solutions that can tackle the unique technical challenges of voice interactions (i.e., real-time latency requirements, natural speech processing, emotional intelligence, etc.). Confido Health and Prosper, for example, are focused on healthcare applications. Meanwhile, Vida and Vaani Research are building infrastructure to develop voice AI/phone agents. Review the voice AI development platforms market to compare 30+ vendors in the space.

Robotics

Companies building robots, and the systems that power them, raised over 70 deals in the month. 

Within robotics, defense & security applications led early-stage activity (17 deals, 24% of total robotics activity), reflecting geopolitical tensions driving investment in autonomous defense systems and surveillance.

Other notable traction is in foundation models and operating systems for robots, as investors bet on horizontal platforms (4 deals, 6%):

• The leading September round in this category went to DYNA, which raised a $120M Series A. The company is ranked as a “challenger” in our robot foundation model developers market. 
• Another highlight is InOrbit, which focuses on robot orchestration and was founded by Florian Pestoni and Julian Cerutti, who have experience at a range of large tech companies, including Google, Atlassian, Meta, and IBM. The founders’ strong pedigree is reflected in the company’s CB Insights Management strength score, which ranked the highest of all the companies raising early-stage deals in September.

Management strength score

CB Insights’ Management strength scores (out of 1,000) the founding and management team’s prior achievements and likelihood of achieving future success, like a high-value exit. 

Especially at the earliest stages of the startup lifecycle, the strength of the management team serves as a key signal of potential. 

AI for scientific discovery & materials development 

Three of the largest early-stage rounds of the quarter went to companies looking to accelerate scientific discovery and materials development with AI: 

• Periodic Labs ($300M Series A at $1B valuation)
• Lila Sciences ($235M Series A at $1.23B valuation)
• CuspAI ($100M Series A at $520M valuation) 

Both Periodic Labs and Lila Sciences are also building “autonomous labs” — with AI designing, conducting and iterating on experiments. All 3 companies are operating at Commercial Maturity level 2/5 (Validating), indicating they’re still testing and refining their products.

Methodology

This report includes equity early-stage financings (convertible note, angel, pre-seed, seed, Series A) to private companies in August 2025. We excluded companies that are later-stage that raised an angel round or convertible note in the month. Categorization based on company descriptions.

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In this report, we used CB Insights data, including funding and dealmaking, valuations, exit activity, and talent signals to highlight the key forces propelling growth and market evolution across fintech.

Key takeaways from the report include:

• Fintech funding is flat vs. Q2’25, but capital is concentrating in mega-rounds. Fintech funding hit $10.9B in Q3’25. Deal count declined 9%, mirroring the slowdown in dealmaking across venture. But mega-rounds accounted for 40% of all funding as investors continue to shift toward fewer, larger bets: year-to-date, average and median deal sizes are more than 35% above 2024 levels, even as deal count declines. If this trend continues, smaller competitors may face increased pressure, potentially accelerating consolidation and strategic acquisitions in the sector. 
• AI captures nearly one-quarter of fintech funding as agentic solutions gain market traction. Five of the top 10 deals went to AI-powered finance platforms like Ramp and AppZen, positioning AI leaders to widen their competitive gap as AI-first and agentic solutions scale.
• Investors shift to more established fintechs. In Q3’25, mid- and late-stage fintech deal share reached its highest level since 2021 at 22%. As investors look for clearer paths to scale, funding, high valuations, and exits are concentrating among more mature players, potentially limiting opportunities for early-stage startups.  
• The recovery in fintech exit activity continues. Fintech exits accelerated in Q3’25, with M&A deals rising 19% to 249 — the highest in more than 3 years — and IPOs for the quarter reaching 15, a 16-quarter high. Digital assets remain a key driver: many of the largest M&A and public offerings were in crypto, underscoring growing institutional interest. The rebound signals growing investor confidence and could spur further consolidation, particularly into crypto-focused fintech.
  
• Wealth tech maintains momentum, with funding on pace to nearly double 2024 totals and companies ramping up hiring activity. Wealth tech’s YTD funding of $4.2B has already surpassed its 2024 level, making it one of the few fintech sectors with strong momentum across the year. Companies in the sector are also expanding rapidly: according to CB Insights talent signals, 3 of the top 5 fastest-growing tech markets in year-over-year hiring are in wealth tech, signaling strong confidence in digital-first wealth management solutions. AI is accelerating this momentum, with applications that can quickly enhance investment and advisory tools, driving faster adoption.

We dive into the trends below.

Fintech funding is flat vs. Q2’25, but capital is concentrating in mega-rounds

In Q3’25, fintech funding was flat versus Q2’25, at $10.9B. Deal count declined 9%, mirroring the broader slowdown in dealmaking across venture. Every fintech vertical saw quarter-over-quarter declines except for payments and capital markets, the latter of which was mainly boosted by iCapital’s $820M raise.

The iCapital deal underscores the return of mega-rounds’ impact in fintech. In Q3, the 10 largest equity deals were all $100M+ rounds, with mega-rounds accounting for 40% of total funding — just below Q2’s 42%, a 9-quarter peak. This shift is driving average and median deal sizes higher, both of which are more than 35% higher YTD than in 2024.

If the trend toward fewer, larger deals persists, the gap between top-tier fintechs and smaller competitors will continue to widen. This could accelerate consolidation in mid-stage fintech and favor strategic acquisitions by incumbents.

AI captures nearly one-quarter of fintech funding as agentic solutions gain market traction

Among the largest deals in Q3’25 were rounds for AI-powered fintechs, highlighting the growing role of autonomous solutions in finance and creating a new competitive tier in fintech. AI-enabled fintechs captured 23% of Q3’25 fintech funding, the highest share since Q4’23. 

Five of the 10 largest fintech equity deals went to companies heavily deploying AI in their solutions. Ramp raised a $500M Series E-II just 45 days after its initial Series E in June 2025, as it launched hundreds of AI-powered tools and its first AI agents. AppZen, which builds AI agents for financial operations with its proprietary LLM, also raised a $180M Series D round. 

AI-enabled companies’ share of fintech deals remained steady at 17% in both Q2 and Q3’25,  reflecting investors’ focus on proven autonomous capabilities. 

Investors shift to more established fintechs 

Investors are also prioritizing investments in more mature fintechs in 2025, signaling a structural reset in risk appetite. 

Mid- and late-stage companies have captured 22% of all deals YTD, the highest concentration since 2021. Median deal sizes YTD for mid- and late-stage deals have also increased vs. 2024, by 16% and 50%, respectively.

In contrast, early-stage deals now make up less than two-thirds (66%) of total activity, the first dip below 70% since 2020. The shift reflects a strategic pivot toward companies with established business models and clearer paths to scale.

The largest mid- and late-stage rounds went to companies with proven scale, predictable growth, and measurable efficiency gains. In addition to the large late-stage rounds for Ramp and AppZen, investors concentrated on financial operations solutions, including automated accounts payable (Xelix), small business financial management (Hala, Uzum), and ERP solutions (Omie).

Meanwhile, competition for capital among early-stage companies is intensifying. Digital asset startups remain notable, capturing almost one-third of the top 20 seed and Series A deals. The rounds include Stable ($28M), which raised $28M to build a blockchain for USDT payments and announced a partnership with PayPal, and Agora ($50M), which offers white-label stablecoins.

For fintech executives and investors, this shift implies that capital will increasingly flow to proven players, potentially compressing opportunities for early-stage startups. If the late-stage concentration continues, we expect 2026’s fintech unicorn pipeline to shrink, and exits will cluster among today’s leaders. Early-stage companies may face longer timelines to reach scale or be forced into strategic partnerships or acquisitions.

The recovery in fintech exit activity continues

Exits in fintech continued to climb quarter-over-quarter, signaling renewed investor confidence as well as opportunities in crypto. 

M&A activity grew 19% to 249 deals, the highest level in more than 3 years and 73% higher than the trough in Q3’23. IPO activity reached its highest point since Q4’21, and just the fifth time the quarterly figure hit double digits in the last 4 years. 

Similar to last quarter, digital assets remain a driving force in exits. Four of the 10 largest M&A deals in the quarter went to stablecoin and crypto payments companies. Ripple‘s $200M acquisition of stablecoin payments provider Rail marks its second major purchase this year, following April’s Hidden Road deal. This concentrated activity reflects traditional finance’s rush to build crypto capabilities, a trend that will accelerate as regulatory frameworks solidify.

Meanwhile, crypto exchanges Bullish and Gemini completed public offerings, highlighting rising institutional interest. The public market activity provides benchmarks for valuations and signals investor appetite for digital asset innovation.

Continued M&A and IPO momentum is driving fintech’s first major acquisition cycle since 2021. For crypto infrastructure, regulatory clarity and institutional adoption are likely to accelerate consolidation. Broadly, the next exit wave will create new exit opportunities for early- and mid-stage fintechs, while late-stage companies may find IPO windows opening earlier. 

Wealth tech maintains momentum, with funding on pace to nearly double 2024 totals and companies ramping up hiring quickly

Wealth tech remains resilient as investors double down on mature wealth solutions and AI-augmented solutions. While funding in the space hit declined QoQ to $1.6B, YTD funding in wealth tech of $4.2B already surpasses 2024’s full-year total of $3.4B, despite broader market headwinds.

Driving Q3’s wealth tech funding total were companies focused on automation, including automated portfolio management software (Pave Finance) and tech-enabled advisors and retirement plans (Savvy Wealth, Vestwell).

Wealth tech companies are also hiring rapidly. According to CB Insights Talent Signals, 3 of the top 5 fastest-growing fintech markets by year-over-year hiring are in wealth tech, covering AI tools for financial advisor productivity and investment intelligence. Year-over-year headcount growth in all of these markets exceeds the fintech average of 5.7% by sixfold or more.

The rapid headcount expansion across AI advisor tools suggests wealth management is approaching an automation inflection point. AI can quickly boost advisor productivity and investment decision-making, creating fast, tangible impact. AI-augmented advisors will become a critical differentiator in wealth management, creating opportunities for strategic investments, tech partnerships, and M&A for AI-enabled advisory solutions.

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Every big tech company and a rapidly growing private market landscape are building agent offerings targeting enterprise use cases and industries from financial services to manufacturing.

For enterprises across sectors, one question is becoming unavoidable: Which AI agent strategies will separate market leaders from those left behind?

Enterprises are under pressure to build and implement agents as these LLM-based systems change how companies operate, hire, and scale.

Across 9 reports, discover where startup innovation is pointing, promising partnership and acquisition targets, and key trends to watch based on CB Insights predictive intelligence. Download the report for free.

This 68-page report covers: 

Foreword from Manlio Carrelli, CEO of CB Insights

Outlook on AI agents

6 AI agent predictions looking into 2026

The AI agent ecosystem — Who are the startups, infrastructure providers, and emerging revenue leaders to watch?

• The AI agent market map
• The AI agent tech stack
• The AI agent revenue race

AI agents make inroads across enterprise workflows — How are agents reshaping coding, customer service, and backend operations at scale?

• Y Combinator’s 2025 Spring batch reveals the future of agentic AI
• Building the agent economy: How cloud leaders are shaping AI’s next frontier
• The summer of vibe coding is over — How reasoning models broke the economics of AI code generation

Industry applications gain momentum — Where are vertical-specific agents gaining adoption and delivering measurable ROI?

• 3 markets fueling the shift to agentic commerce
• The industrial AI agents & copilots market map
• 100 real-world applications of genAI across financial services and insurance

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Track 450+ companies in CB Insights’ Stablecoin Expert Collection

Our methodology focuses on companies with strong acquisition potential by filtering for:

• M&A Probability: CB Insights’ proprietary signal measuring a private company’s chance of an M&A exit within the next 2 years, used to screen companies based on exit likelihood.
• Mosaic Score: CB Insights’ proprietary metric measuring private companies’ overall health and growth potential using non-traditional signals, widely used to identify high-potential emerging tech companies.

All companies in our stablecoin acquisition radar have above-average M&A probability (greater than 20%) and Mosaic scores (greater than 370).

Within this dataset, we identified the most promising acquisition candidates across the stablecoin ecosystem, with Mosaic scores greater than 650 and M&A probabilities over 35%.

Stablecoin funding and fintech M&A surge in tandem

Stablecoin funding is set to surge nearly tenfold in 2025, reaching a projected $10.2B. This funding boost coincides with a sustained spike in fintech M&A activity overall. Meanwhile, domestic fintechs are increasingly active in stablecoins, indicating near-future acquisitions by payment processors and crypto giants.

For example, Ripple, which has recently launched a stablecoin, acquired prime brokerage Hidden Road, and applied for a banking license, acquired stablecoin B2B remittance company Rail.io for $200M, positioning itself as an enterprise financial services provider powered by blockchain technology.

Mike Giampapa, General Partner of Galaxy Ventures (which provided Series A funding to Rail last year) explains:

”Despite $190T+ in annual flows, cross-border payments remain outdated. Galaxy Ventures invests in stablecoins and next-gen rails to deliver more efficient, transparent, and programmable payments. Rail stood out as an API-first platform merging fiat and digital into one compliant network – removing friction, lowering costs, and setting a new global standard for payments.”

Key takeaways:

Many companies in the M&A interest zone are developing stablecoin infrastructure designed for existing financial services providers, positioning themselves to support traditional financial institutions wading deeper into digital assets

This also makes them prime targets for crypto giants looking for entry points to mainstream financial processes.

With an M&A probability of 35% and a Mosaic score of 790, the next logical target could be OpenTrade, which offers white-label stablecoin infrastructure and yield products to neobanks, custodians, and treasury managers. Bastion (36% M&A probability, 696 Mosaic score) provides a stablecoin issuance platform for financial institutions and enterprises, making it attractive for controlling traditional finance’s entry into stablecoins.

Major crypto companies are already blending stablecoin capabilities with conventional financial services. Ripple’s acquisitions of Rail.io and Hidden Road, alongside its banking license application and RLUSD launch, signal a strategy to provide enterprise financial services using blockchain infrastructure. And stablecoin issuer Circle applied for a banking license in June following its $7B IPO earlier that month. As crypto giants increasingly resemble financial institutions, the startups using stablecoins to build bridges to TradFi emerge as key acquisition targets to drive and support this process.

Startups using stablecoins to facilitate cross-border payments via on- and off-ramps are prime candidates for acquisition

As the highest-potential acquisition target, 1Money Network stands out with a 62% M&A probability and 670 Mosaic score. Like Ripple’s recent acquisition, Rail, 1Money Network’s API offering for high-volume, cross-border stablecoin transactions makes it an attractive target for established processors looking to rapidly deploy stablecoin capabilities globally or crypto giants encroaching on traditional finance. And like Rail, it’s already backed by Galaxy Ventures.

Major payment processors accelerating stablecoin integrations to counter crypto competition will be the next to snap up these key targets. Already, payment processors are rapidly integrating stablecoin infrastructure to defend cross-border payments market share. Mastercard and Visa enabled new stablecoins on their networks this summer. And earnings transcripts mentions of “stablecoins” from both have increased sharply since the beginning of 2025. Meanwhile, Stripe has acquired stablecoin infrastructure companies Privy and Bridge ($1.1B). And it just unveiled a Layer-1 blockchain in partnership with Paradigm designed to facilitate cross-border payments using stablecoins.

Yield solutions are the next key target for players of all sizes

Yield-bearing stablecoins are a nascent space attracting diverse investor attention. Despite having the lowest average commercial maturity scores, yield and liquidity solutions are attracting the most deals and funding among all stablecoin categories.

Big names in fintech and crypto have already begun to acquire companies in the space. Stripe’s acquisition of Bridge last year included its USDB coin, which generates interest through BlackRock money market fund backing. In January, Circle acquired tokenized money market fund provider Hashnote for $5M.

High-potential acquisition targets include Yield.xyz (42% M&A probability, 635 Mosaic score), which aggregates returns across multiple yield opportunities through cross-chain APIs. Zoth (50% M&A probability, 616 Mosaic score) offers restaking layers, tokenized funds, stablecoin issuance, and the ZeUSD token for generating yield from financial instruments.

What is Mosaic?

Mosaic is CB Insights’ proprietary metric that measures private companies’ overall health and growth potential using non-traditional signals. Mosaic is widely used as a target company and market screener to identify high-potential emerging tech companies.

What is M&A Probability?

M&A Probability is CB Insights’ proprietary signal that measures a private company’s chance of an M&A exit within the next 2 years. It is used to quickly screen and triangulate companies based on exit likelihood.

Combining Mosaic Score and M&A Probability makes it easy to shortlist acquisition targets.

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Against this backdrop, Money Awards finalists, ranging from startups to industry veterans, represent the cutting edge of financial innovation. Many of the world’s most promising fintech companies — from AI-powered credit builders like Bloom Credit to stablecoin-powered payments platforms like Cenoa — are pioneering new approaches that blend advanced technology with traditional financial expertise.

Download the full Money Awards Finalist Spotlight to explore analyses of all 60+ companies, and read on for 3 key takeaways and a breakdown of our methodology.

Download the full Money Awards Finalist Spotlight

In the following brief, we used CB Insights data, including Mosaic, our proprietary score for company health, as well as Business Relationships and Hiring Insights to highlight a selection of Money Awards finalists that are driving some of the dominant trends reshaping the fintech landscape. The trends in focus include the following: 

• AI-driven solutions are dominating
• B2B fintech maintains strong momentum
• Fintechs are deploying new models to serve emerging markets

1. AI-driven solutions are dominating

Funding to AI in the first half of 2025 alone surpassed 2024’s record full-year total. As of September 2025, full-year funding is projected to exceed $200B. 

Across banking and payments, AI is increasingly becoming a strategic necessity in financial services. Since nearly a quarter of use cases in deployment focus on cross-functional applications today, fintechs offering specialized AI agents are a key force for competitive differentiation.

• CredCore provides AI agents to support lenders and borrowers in the debt capital markets sector, currently supporting more than $650B AUM. The company more than doubled its headcount following its $16M Series A round in February. 
• Mastercard launched its Agent Pay offering earlier this year to support AI-powered commerce. The solution enables AI agents to make payments on behalf of users. The payments processing leader’s stock price reached an all-time high last month.
• Taktile received $54M in Series B funding in February from backers including Y Combinator. Its mosaic score has increased 27% in the last year to 919, placing it in the top 1% of all private companies. The fintech released new AI agents for SMB credit underwriting earlier this month.

From capital markets to agentic commerce, finalists prove that specialized AI tools provide operational efficiency gains and sustainable competitive advantages.

2. B2B fintech maintains strong momentum

B2B fintech is rapidly gaining momentum as incumbents and startups alike recognize massive digitization opportunities across business banking, payments, and financial infrastructure. In Q2, more than half of the top fintech equity rounds both in banking and payments went to B2B companies.

Incumbents and startups alike are introducing B2B offerings and honing in on business banking needs to capitalize on this lucrative opportunity. Meanwhile, modern technology including stablecoins, real-time payments, and automated compliance tools are enabling this transformation at scale.

The Money Awards finalists showcase retail fintechs successfully shifting their focus to serving other companies:

• Revolut, known worldwide for its consumer banking services, revamped its business interface via its RB5 offering. The fintech enjoyed 40% headcount growth in the past year, achieving its highest ever valuation earlier this month at $75B.
• Yellow Card, which has evolved from a consumer crypto exchange to B2B stablecoin infrastructure, has enjoyed great momentum as a result. In October 2024, it raised a $33M Series C round with participation from Coinbase.
• Greenlight + U.S. Bank: U.S. Bank became the first financial institution to provide Greenlight’s debit card and money management tools to clients directly through its mobile app. Subsequent partnerships with several financial institutions have since established Greenlight as a B2B2C provider.

Award finalists are reaping the rewards of both higher revenue per customer and reduced customer acquisition costs compared to direct consumer models, while serving a very real need for business-focused finance technology.

3. Digital banking empowers underserved populations

As digital platforms expand the potential for access to modern banking in emerging markets, fintechs aim to close gaps left by traditional providers and promote financial inclusion.

According to CB Insights’ industry-wide analysis, digital banking companies maintain the highest average CB Insights Mosaic score (tracking at roughly 550 as of September 2025) among all fintech verticals, with challenger banks leading efforts to serve underbanked populations across the globe.

The Money Awards finalists in the Banking category demonstrate innovative approaches to engaging underbanked populations that are receiving real market traction:

• Nubank, whose market capitalization hit an all-time high last week, made Pix instant payments available to Brazilians directly via WhatsApp. The company has strong market penetration in underbanked regions, with over 100 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
• LTS Ventures has launched digital platforms for more than 1,000 community banks across Laos, extending reach into underserved rural areas. The company combines blockchain-backed technology with AI loan decisioning to bring emerging fintech to over 250,000 customers in Laos.
• JazzCash, which offers branchless banking for consumers and businesses, enjoyed 69% headcount growth within the past year. The company, which has prioritized rollout in underserved areas, serves over 43 million registered users across Pakistan with $4.6B gross transaction value. 

Finalists consistently demonstrate that serving underserved populations represents both social impact and measurable business opportunity.

Download the full Money Awards Finalist Spotlight

Methodology

The Money Awards Jury

What makes The Money Awards truly stand apart is the caliber and diversity of its international jury. Drawn from across the fintech ecosystem, the expert panel brings together C-level decision-makers, founders, investors, and the specialists working on the frontlines of innovation. This unique mix ensures that recognition isn’t just handed down from the top, but validated by those with both strategic vision and hands-on expertise. It’s a jury that reflects the industry in its entirety, by the industry, for the industry, and is best placed to identify the work that genuinely moves the needle.

The judging process itself is deliberately rigorous, independent, and transparent, ensuring credibility at every stage. With over 40 global leaders scrutinising submissions, these awards act as a true third-party seal of excellence. Combined with Money20/20’s deep connection to the worldwide fintech community, winners are not just celebrated on stage, they are endorsed by the very people shaping the future of money.

CB Insights’ Predictive Intelligence

We spotlighted Money2020’s 60+ Money Awards finalists across startups, banking, payments, and partnerships using CB Insights’ predictive intelligence — including data points like funding activity, Mosaic Scores, partnership relationships, and Commercial Maturity ratings.

Analysis incorporates broader CB Insights fintech market data and research, including 100 real-world applications of genAI across financial services and insurance, State of AI Q2’25, State of Fintech Q2’25, State of Fintech Q1’25, and the AI and Digital Banking Expert Collections.

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But among incumbent financial services companies, payments leaders — Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, and Block — are proving better positioned than traditional banks to win this market. 

Compared to the 5 largest retail banks by market cap, our analysis of CB Insights data shows that the 5 largest payments companies by market cap have been far more active in SMB-focused partnerships, acquisitions, and investments over the past 3 years.

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The BNPL leader’s listing is the first one for BNPL providers since Affirm in 2021 and follows Valu’s filing in June 2025. Regulators continue to raise concerns about BNPL’s impact on consumer debt, yet adoption keeps climbing. Nearly 90 million Americans used BNPL in 2024, up 7% year over year, and in certain global markets, usage is even higher. 

Despite the challenging market for exits overall, CB Insights’ IPO probability scores for the strongest BNPL companies are up to 14x the average for all companies. Using the IPO likelihood and CB Insights’ other predictive signals, including Mosaic scores, we’ve identified the BNPL platforms most likely to go public next and what their listings could reveal about the rest of the market.

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In August, private companies globally raised 1,140+ early-stage rounds (noting this total will rise as more deals are published retroactively). Investors are backing startups targeting applications from AI agents to aerospace manufacturing.

Download the full report to access comprehensive CB Insights data on early-stage activity, including top investors & deals, valuation data, and our predictive signals. 

Leading industries & tech areas

Startups targeting healthcare & life science, financial services, and enterprise software led early-stage funding activity in August.

AI is ubiquitous across the landscape. Over 30% of startups that raised rounds are building AI-enabled products and services. Companies targeting AI agent applications in particular raised over 50 deals. 

Other focuses include blockchain/crypto (50+ deals) and robotics (50+ deals). FieldAI, which is developing foundation models for robots, raised a $314M Series A at a $2B valuation — the largest early-stage round of the month. 

CBI Customers: Review the full deal dataset

Emerging & frontier tech categories to watch

More niche categories (those with fewer than 20 deals in the month) show a clear focus on “hard tech” across areas like space, quantum computing, and fusion energy. 

Click the links to see underlying deal activity. Categories are not mutually exclusive. 

• Satellite technology (13 deals): The commercialization of low Earth orbit is accelerating with decreasing launch costs and miniaturization enabling new satellite constellations for communications, Earth observation, and more. SpaceX’s success has opened the door for specialized players, like earth observation platform SkyFi. 12 out of the 13 companies that raised early-stage deals in this category in August are based outside of the US in countries like China and India.
• Space services & manufacturing (9 deals): The emerging space economy is driving activity across areas like transportation & logistics from space to earth (Orbital Paradigm) and in space (Orbital Operations). Companies such as Orbital Matter and Catalyx Space are leveraging microgravity to manufacture materials, components, and pharmaceuticals in space. 
• Quantum computing & secure communications (7 deals): Startups are developing quantum hardware, software, and infrastructure to tackle complex problems and keep data safe in the era of quantum technology. Examples include superconducting processors (QuamCore), quantum-inspired software for industries like finance and logistics (QMill), and quantum-secure satellite networks (olee).
• Fusion (4 deals): The AI boom has created a $500B power infrastructure gap for data centers, triggering a race to secure nuclear technology. Fusion represents a longer-term breakthrough that could revolutionize power generation. Startups like Canada-based Fusion Fuel Cycles and Japan-based MiRESSO are focused on producing enabling materials and tech.

Top companies by Management strength score

Especially at the earliest stages of the startup lifecycle, the strength of the management team serves as a key signal of potential. 

Using CB Insights’ Management strength score — which scores the founding and management team’s prior achievements and likelihood of achieving future success, like a high-value exit — these are the top 3 startups in this month’s cohort: 

• Perle (976 out of 1,000) — Founder Ahmed Rashman was previously Head of Supply and Growth at Scale, and has experience across a range of large tech companies including Amazon and Oracle. 
• Lettuce (973) — Founder Ran Harpaz was founding CTO of Globality (valued at $1B in 2019) and former CTO at Hippo Insurance (went public in 2021). 
• Lorikeet (858) — Co-founder Steve Hind previously worked in product at Stripe for 3 years, while co-founder Jamie Hall was a software engineer at Google for nearly 7 years. 

See the rest of the top 10 by Management strength in the full report. 

Methodology

This report includes equity early-stage financings (convertible note, angel, pre-seed, seed, Series A) to private companies in August 2025. We excluded companies that are later-stage that raised an angel round or convertible note in the month. Categorization based on company descriptions.

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Among the top 50 private companies globally, the US and China account for 86% of the list, while AI startups represent 40%. These companies are reshaping industries and, in some cases, surpassing their public market competitors in valuation. 

OpenAI is reportedly poised to hit a roughly $500B valuation — putting it closer to the ranks of big tech than any other startup. At the same time, the current top 50 companies’ combined valuation represents under half of Nvidia’s current market cap of $4.3T, underscoring the relative scale of public tech giants.

Using CB Insights data, we analyzed the top 50 most valuable private companies globally to identify where value creation is happening in private markets. Below are the key patterns emerging from the group.

Track all 1,200+ unicorns

Key takeaways

• The United States and China dominate the global unicorn landscape, representing 86% of the top 50 companies. The US leads with 35 companies (70%), while China contributes 8 companies (16%), showing how concentrated tech innovation and capital formation remains within these two tech regions. The remaining 6 countries — Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, Sweden and the UK — each have only 1-2 representing companies.
• AI companies represent 40% of the top 50, signaling the market’s confidence in AI as a primary driver of economic value. These companies range from the big names building foundation models like OpenAI and Anthropic to specialized players tackling applications like defense systems (Helsing, Anduril).
• Abundant private funding enables companies to delay going public while continuing to scale. Today, startups are going public an average of 16 years after being founded, 4 years later than just a decade ago. Databricks recently surpassed its public competitor Snowflake in valuation ($100B) at its recent $1B Series K round. Meanwhile, ByteDance ($300B valuation), generated more revenue than Meta in Q1’25 while staying private. With plenty of private capital available and employees able to sell shares on secondary markets, companies can grow much larger without going public.
• Secondary transactions are increasingly driving valuations, with 7 consecutive quarters of YoY growth in transaction activity among VC-backed companies. Recent secondary sales at companies like Canva (valued at $42B, up from $32B in 2024), Revolut (valued at $75B, up from $45B), and OpenAI’s upcoming $10.3B secondary sale at a rumored $500B valuation demonstrate this trend. As startups stay private for longer, secondary sales are providing both liquidity and fresh valuations. 

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To create the 2025 list, we analyzed 10 years of CB Insights’ Business Graph data, evaluating 12,000+ venture firms on portfolio outcomes (unicorns and exits), share of rounds led, portfolio quality via Mosaic Score, capital efficiency, and entry discipline. Smart Money VC portfolios offer a front-row view of where the sharpest investors are placing their bets. Use the list as an early indicator to spot emerging markets and promising founders.

Which VC firms are on the Smart Money list?

Firms are presented in alphabetical order.

1. Accel
2. Andreessen Horowitz
3. Bain Capital Ventures
4. Battery Ventures
5. Bessemer Venture Partners
6. Felicis
7. First Round Capital
8. Founders Fund
9. General Catalyst
10. Google Ventures
11. Greylock Partners
12. Index Ventures
13. Institutional Venture Partners
14. Kleiner Perkins
15. Lightspeed Venture Partners
16. Meritech Capital Partners
17. New Enterprise Associates
18. Norwest Venture Partners
19. Notable Capital
20. Redpoint Ventures
21. Salesforce Ventures
22. Sapphire Ventures
23. Sequoia Capital
24. Spark Capital
25. Thrive Capital

CBI customers: See Smart Money’s latest bets

How Smart Money VCs are outperforming the market

Our 2025 edition of Smart Money VCs:

• 6.5x more likely than the average VC to back a future unicorn
• 2.2x more exits per firm, either through M&A or IPO
• 2.3x higher share of rounds led, shaping pricing and syndicates

Smart Money syndicates amplify signal. The top pairs share dozens of portfolio companies — Sequoia & Andreessen Horowitz (43), General Catalyst & Andreessen Horowitz (42), and Sequoia & Lightspeed (36). Most widely backed across the cohort: Chainguard, Figma, and Wiz (each with 7 Smart Money backers).

Smart Money firms have also been the dominant backers of the AI wave — they backed 52% of new AI unicorns in 2023, 73% in 2024, and 77% in 2025 YTD — and that exposure is translating into outlier outcomes.

Since 2015, Smart Money VCs have backed 80 companies that exited at $10B+ — roughly 100x the $100M median exit. The largest Smart Money exits include Uber ($75.5B, 2019), Coinbase ($65.3B, 2021), and Coupang ($56.6B, 2021).

Mosaic shows where they’re headed next. Smart Money portfolios skew to higher Mosaic Scores — CB Insights’ 0–1,000 predictive rating of private-company health. The average portfolio Mosaic is 628 — about 2.6x the VC norm.

And the edge is most visible at the very top of the distribution: more than 65% of companies in the top 1% of Mosaic Scores are backed by a Smart Money VC. Top firms by average portfolio Mosaic include Meritech (759), IVP (741), and Thrive Capital (688). Standout companies in 2025 include Zepto, Bilt, Glean, Rippling, and Anthropic.

Where Smart Money is deploying now

Smart Money is still leaning into AI — especially agentic applications.

Over the last 18 months, agent-related categories led by deal count: coding agents and copilots (28 deals), agent development platforms (24), enterprise workflow agents and copilots (20), and legal agents and copilots (17). Infrastructure remained active as well, with 17 deals into LLM developers. Top recent AI deals by Mosaic include Glean (enterprise AI agents), Augment Code (coding AI agents), and ElevenLabs (voice AI).

Our M&A probability model points to cybersecurity as the most likely near‑term exit pool among Smart Money portfolios, with companies like Tenex.ai ranking highest. Activity is accelerating — highlighted by Google’s $32B acquisition of Smart Money–backed Wiz in March 2025. For acquirers, targeting Smart Money portfolio or syndicate companies can streamline diligence and post‑deal integration.

Outside the US, cybersecurity is also drawing Smart Money. Since Jan’24, Accel (84 deals), General Catalyst (64), and Lightspeed (55) are the most active by ex‑US deal count; their portfolios include companies like Tines, Cato Networks, and Torq.

Methodology

What is the CB Insights Smart Money list?

The Smart Money list is an unranked collection of the top 25 venture capital firms worldwide. We analyzed 12,000+ venture investors with 10+ unique portfolio companies using 10 years of CB Insights’ Business Graph data (2015–2025) to surface the highest performers via our Smart Money Index.

What makes a VC “smart”?

​​Comparable lists in other asset classes rank firms based on investment performance, but returns data is hard to come by in the VC world, and rates of return can be easily manipulated.

Our methodology factors:

• Portfolio outcomes — unicorn count/share and exit count/share
• Deal leadership — share of rounds led
• Portfolio quality — average CB Insights Mosaic Score
• Capital efficiency — portfolio value created per dollar raised
• Entry discipline — median stage at first check

Inputs were normalized and combined into the Smart Money Index. The top 25 became the 2025 Smart Money cohort.

What can I do with this collection?

Explore the Smart Money Expert Collection on the CB Insights platform to filter deals, build screens, and make faster decisions.

If you are a venture investor and want to submit data on your portfolio companies to allow us to better score you in the future, please reach out to researchanalyst@cbinsights.com.

RELATED RESOURCES FROM CB INSIGHTS:

• All 100 AI unicorns since ChatGPT launched
• State of Tech Exits H1’25
• The top angel investors in AI
• Are AI unicorns starting to move beyond hype?
• Book of Scouting Reports: Enterprise AI Agents

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M&A volume stayed flat in the first half of the year, and the IPO market remained muted, though there are early signs of a potential second-half recovery. In the meantime, capital continues to flow into private tech companies at record levels, including a surge in secondary transactions. This is giving private tech companies more runway (and more reason) to delay public listings.

New exit models are also gaining traction. From large minority stakes to reverse acqui-hires, big tech companies are finding ways to access talent and technology without triggering regulatory review. These deal structures are starting to reshape how value is created, captured, and distributed across the ecosystem — for founders, investors, and employees alike.

Taken together, these trends point to a broader shift: private markets are becoming the dominant venue for value creation and capture in tech. With that comes the need for better private market investing infrastructure, including real-time data and context, turning private company intelligence into a new competitive advantage. 

Below, we break down the top stories from this first half of the year and our projections for the rest of the year, including:

• AI and $100M+ deals drive tech M&A momentum
• Signs point to tech IPO market rebound in H2’25
• Private tech markets top $2T in equity funding
• Secondaries get bigger and pricier
• New exit models emerge amidst the AI talent war

Download the full report to access comprehensive CB Insights data and charts on the evolving state of tech exits, in partnership with EquityZen.

Top stories in H1’25

1. AI and $100M+ deals drive tech M&A momentum

Tech M&A activity has remained stubbornly flat since Q4’23, stagnating at just over 2,000 transactions per quarter. We project Q3’25 to follow the same trajectory, with 2,040 deals.

Despite flat volume, this year is shaping up to be a record year in terms of M&A deal value, driven by an increase in the number of $100M+ acquisitions. These large transactions represent 4.7% of deal share so far this year, up from 3.8% from all of 2024, and a level not seen since 2021.

AI has also emerged as a bright spot, as corporations race to grab AI tech & talent.

M&A activity in AI reached record levels in Q2’25 at 192 deals, pushing AI’s share of tech M&A to 7.5% so far this year — almost double its share in 2021. Private companies have notably led some of the largest AI acquisitions in the first half of 2025, with OpenAI acquiring Io for $6.5B and Databricks spending $1B to buy Neon. 

The AI race is also pushing big tech companies to rethink their M&A strategy, after years of muted activity. 

Meta scooped up voice AI startups PlayAI and WaveForms this summer — marking its first acquisition since 2022 — in a bid to win the race to build the future of human-machine interactions. The company is betting that voice will become the dominant interface for interacting with AI.

During the company’s Q3’25 earnings call, Apple’s CEO mentioned being open to larger M&A deals to help accelerate its roadmap. This marks a significant move away from Apple’s historical focus on smaller acquisitions.  

Dive into 7 AI-related areas where we expect to see M&A activity this year, as well as high-potential acquisition targets for each, in the free report.

2. Signs point to tech IPO market rebound in H2’25

The global tech IPO market has remained muted during the first half of 2025, with 122 tech companies going public, in line with the numbers from 2024. But recent activity signals things may be picking up.

Figma successfully went public last month, in an IPO often referred to as a test of the public market’s appetite for tech companies. The company was valued at just over $16B at IPO and now boasts a market cap of $39B (as of 8/20/2025).

A few weeks later, crypto exchange platform Bullish followed a similar path, raising $1.1B in at a $5.4B valuation. The company is now trading at a 60%+ premium to its IPO price.

These recent examples have pushed several tech companies (crypto in particular) to announce they had filed to go public, reviving hopes of a tech IPO market rebound. Based on current trends, we project 84 tech IPOs for Q3 ’25 — above the 2-year quarterly average of 72.

Find 40+ blockchain companies with a high probability of going public in the next 2 years

But any rebound is likely to be modest, with private tech companies expected to remain private for longer and the role of IPOs potentially shifting to becoming a clearinghouse rather than a capital-raising mechanism, as predicted by Jared Carmel, Managing Partner, Manhattan Venture Partners:

“We’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how tech companies approach public markets. The average age at IPO has increased dramatically, from under 4 years in 2000 to 12 years in 2015 and nearly 16 years today. I expect this trend to accelerate, with companies staying private for 20+ years becoming the new norm.

The aggressive IPO pops we’ve historically seen are fundamentally unfair to founders and long-term investors who actually built these companies. Over the next several years, you’re going to see VCs, private equity, and sovereign wealth funds step in to extract maximum value before these companies ever go public. When they eventually do an IPO, they’ll go public at fair market value without the pop — essentially using public markets as a clearinghouse rather than a capital-raising mechanism.

This shift is already playing out in the data. We’re seeing record levels of private funding, exceeding $2 trillion in cumulative investment, and explosive growth in secondary transactions. The real value creation and liquidity will increasingly occur in private markets, rather than public ones. With companies staying private for two decades, secondary liquidity becomes absolutely critical — employees, early investors, and founders can’t wait 20 years for an exit.”

3. Private tech markets top $2T in equity funding

Private tech companies are staying private longer and now have more capital than ever to do so. 

Over $2T in cumulative equity funding has poured into private tech markets to date, with 90% raised in just the last decade. That funding has enabled companies to keep scaling before tapping the public markets. Today, startups are going public an average of 16 years after being founded, 4 years later than just a decade ago.

Late-stage rounds have also reached new extremes, with Databricks joining the exclusive “Series K” club in July. Just 16 Series K rounds have ever been raised — half in the last 5 years — signaling the growing normalization of ultra-late-stage private fundraising.

Private market check sizes have also grown dramatically. The past 18 months alone account for the largest Seed, Series A, Series B, Series D, and Series E+ rounds on record. And more dry powder is on the way: a recent executive order in the US is opening the door for 401(k) retirement accounts to invest in private markets, potentially unlocking a new wave of capital for private tech companies.

As regulatory barriers fall and new investment vehicles emerge, private tech company investments will increasingly define institutional — and eventually retail — portfolios. 

But there’s a catch. 

Private companies operate in information shadows, beyond public view. Institutions will increasingly need real-time data and context on companies not subject to quarterly reporting, turning private company intelligence into a new competitive advantage. 

4. Secondaries get bigger and pricier

The last 7 quarters have seen YoY growth in secondary transaction activity among VC-backed companies, with no signs of slowing down. As tech companies stay private longer and valuations continue to climb, secondaries are playing a growing role in providing liquidity.

In August 2025, OpenAI reportedly launched a tender offer at a $500B valuation, a sharp jump from its last reported $300B. The offer gives current and former employees a chance to cash out while attracting new capital from institutional buyers. Canva followed a similar playbook, recently conducting a secondary sale at $42B. That’s $10B higher than its October 2024 valuation, which was also set during a prior secondary transaction.

These moves are helping long-time employees and early investors realize returns, while giving latecomers a shot at high-growth companies.

Investor demand is heating up too. According to EquityZen, average discounts in secondary markets have compressed to just 13% below last-round valuations — the lowest level observed between Q1’23 and Q2’25. That pricing shift reflects growing competition and perceived upside, even in companies potentially years from IPO.

While large players like SpaceX, Ripple, and OpenAI continue to dominate transaction volume, interest is expanding to smaller unicorns and breakout startups. In Q2’25, 7 of EquityZen’s top 10 secondary movers had Mosaic scores over 800 and valuations north of $1B, including names like Axiom Space, Brex, and Skild AI.

Explore 500+ private tech companies with strong secondary potential

As secondary markets mature, they’re reshaping liquidity expectations — and giving investors new ways to get exposure to private tech winners without waiting for the IPO window to reopen.

5. New exit models emerge amidst the AI talent war

The intensifying race for AI talent is driving a new wave of unconventional exits in the tech ecosystem, bypassing traditional M&A while still delivering strategic value to acquirers. 

Tight regulation has pushed big tech companies to shift away from full takeovers and toward deal structures that offer access to technology and, more importantly, talent, without triggering antitrust alarms.

Large minority stakes have emerged as one such mechanism. In Q2’25, Meta invested $14.8B for a 49% stake in Scale, marking the largest private funding round of the quarter. As part of the deal, Meta hired Scale’s CEO and founder, Alexandr Wang. At their current pace, big tech companies are on track to complete 14 corporate minority deals in 2025.

Reverse acqui-hires  — where acquirers buy the team (fully or partially) and license the technology — are also gaining momentum. These hybrid transactions often include lucrative licensing fees that serve as a partial liquidity event for investors.

Notable examples include:

• Google hiring key personnel from Windsurf to join its DeepMind division, including CEO Varun Mohan and co-founder Douglas Chen 
• Amazon hiring key members of Adept
• Microsoft bringing in employees from Inflection AI

These transactions let acquirers cherry-pick talent and assets without facing regulatory hurdles or needing to buy out entire cap tables.

But it’s not just big tech adapting;  major LLM developers are adopting similar tactics. OpenAI and Anthropic have collectively made 3 acqui-hires so far in 2025 — Context.ai, Crossing Minds, and Humanloop.

These nontraditional exits may complicate fundraising and hiring for AI startups, as investors and employees weigh the risk of being bypassed in partial team acquisitions. In response, both groups may begin negotiating protective terms to ensure they aren’t left behind.

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