Startup Trends: The 5 top funded startups of Q3 2024

Five firms from various industries — Groq, Arsenal Bio, Magic, Crible, and Devoted Health — ranked among the highest in fundraising in the third quarter of 2024.

Overall, VC funding to startups in North America in Q3 rose 14% year-over-year to $40.5 billion, bucking a decline over the same period for global VC funding, according to Crunchbase. Late-stage investment posted the strongest gains in the region, with funding rising 19% from a year earlier.

Groq, a maker of AI chips

Groq, an AI chipmaker, announced in August that it raised $640 million in a Series D round of financing, giving it a valuation of $2.8 billion.

Groq produces chips specifically for AI inference chips, which run generative AI models. The company says its language processing units, or LPUs, are designed specifically for machine learning and have performance that surpasses traditional graphics processing units (GPUs). The latest funding will allow it to deploy more than 100,000 LPUs into its GroqCloud, an on-demand public cloud that allows hundreds of thousands of developers to build on open models. The company is partnering with oil producer Aramco to build a data center in Saudi Arabia that is designed to become a hub for enterprise AI systems across the Middle East, Africa, and India, according to Bloomberg.

The latest funding was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock Private Equity Partners. New and existing investors participating include Neuberger Berman, Type One Ventures, Cisco Investments, Global Brain’s KDDI Open Innovation Fund III, and Samsung Catalyst Fund.

Mountain View, California-based Groq’s Forge Price™ is $16.08 as of October 30, 2024, implying a valuation of $2.81 billion.

ArsenalBio, a biotechnology company

ArsenalBio, a cell therapy company focused on engineering therapies for solid tumors, announced in September that it raised $325 million in Series C funding from new investors including ARCH Venture Partners, Milky Way Investments Group, Regeneron Ventures, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), and Luma Group. Existing investors — including the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Westlake Village BioPartners, and Kleiner Perkins — also participated in the funding round.

ArsenalBio will use the money from the fundraising to continue to build its pipeline of therapeutic candidates to treat solid tumors based on its proprietary T-cell engineering technology. The South San Francisco-based company’s “robust” pipeline includes potential therapies under development for ovarian, kidney, and prostate cancers.

ArsenalBio’s Forge Price™ is $18.58 as of October 30, 2024, giving the company an implied valuation of $1.66 billion.

Magic, which helps AI models write software

Magic, a software developer, announced in August that it raised $320 million in a Series C fundraising from new investors Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, and others, including Jane Street, Sequoia, and Atlassian. Existing investors Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Elad Gil, and Alphabet’s CapitalG participated in the funding round. The company has now raised a total of $515 million.

Magic builds frontier code models to automate software engineering and research. The company’s work to automate AI research and code generation will improve models and solve alignment more reliably than humans, creating a “promising path” to safe artificial general intelligence.

In August, the San Francisco-based company said it would build its next two supercomputers on Google Cloud. NVIDIA chips will power Magic-G4 and Magic-G5.

Magic’s Forge Price™ is $70.40 as of October 30, 2024. That gives Magic an implied valuation of $1.51 billion.

Cribl, a data technology provider

Cribl, an enterprise software provider for data management, announced in August that it raised $319 million in Series E financing. The funding was led by Google Ventures and new investor CapitalG, along with participation from existing investors GIV Capital, IVP, and CRV. Google Ventures General Partner Michael McBride will join Cribl’s board along with the investment. According to Crible, the funding increases the firm’s valuation to $3.5 billion.

Cribl puts IT and security data at the center of a firm’s data management strategy. Clients can then analyze, collect, process, and route IT and security data at scale. A quarter of Fortune 500 companies are Cribl customers, and the customer base of the San Francisco-based company has grown at a triple-digit rate year-over-year for five straight years.

As of October 30, 2024, Cribl’s Forge Price™ is $3.86, giving the company an implied valuation of $3.5 billion.

Devoted Health, a health care company

Devoted Health, a health care plan provider for older consumers, announced in August that it completed a $287 million Series E funding round, with investors including The Space Between, Cox Enterprises, and White Road Capital. The funding will support the expansion of Devoted’s health insurance, virtual-first medical care, and a world-class service experience across the U.S.

Devoted Health describes its mission as improving how healthcare is paid for, delivered, and experienced. The company provides Medicare Advantage plans to older consumers, service guides, telemedicine, and in-home services through in-house clinicians and access to doctors and hospitals in members’ local communities. Waltham, Massachusetts-based Devoted Health currently operates in 20 states.

Devoted Health's Forge Price™ is $56.25 as of October 30, 2024, implying a valuation of $13.03 billion.