Corporate investors are seeing the number and value of exits for the startups they have invested in increasing steadily since the start of 2025, and that overall trend continued in the third quarter, with 205 exits tracked. The value of exits is not always disclosed, but for those exits where it was known Global Corporate Venturing estimates the cumulative total at $123bn raised, more than double the amount seen in the same quarter a year ago.
Several large acquisitions, including the $60bn acquisition of AI coding tool Cursor by SpaceX, and the $12.9bn acquisition of Hugging Face by Nvidia helped lift the valuation total. Both acquisitions were plays by US AI infrastructure powerhouses to buy up developer distribution networks. These deals are designed to diversify Nvidia and SpaceX as raw AI compute becomes commoditised, and sets them up to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft.
The third quarter also saw a number of Chinese corporate-backed startups make their stock market debuts. The biggest of these was ChangXin Memory, a memory chipmaker rival to companies like Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, which listed on Shanghai’s STAR market in July, becoming one of China’s highest-valued technology stocks. Alibaba and Tencent, as well as a number of other Chinese strategic corporate investors, were backers of ChangXin Memory.
Chinese robotics companies Unitree Robotics, Direct Drive Tech and Mech-Mind also listed on the stock market in the third quarter, reflecting surging interest in humanoid robotics in China.