8 Times AI Startups Turned into Acquisition Targets

AI startups today are finding success by solving specific, high-value problems in narrow domains, while the general-purpose AI market is being dominated by tech giants. 

These startups integrate AI into industry-specific workflows, automating tasks such as insurance claims processing, legal document review and hospital billing.

This focused approach has created an unexpected opportunity: instead of building competing solutions, established SaaS companies are acquiring these startups outright. Buying the capability is faster than developing it in-house.

For startups, this shift is significant. The threat of large incumbents replicating their products may actually lead to acquisition offers instead.

“SaaS giants are buying their way into AI,” Bessemer Venture Partners noted in a report advising early-stage startups. “Build technical and data moats. Be M&A-ready, but operate like you’ll own the category.”

The trend is accelerating. CB Insights reported a record 172 AI acquisition deals in Q3 2025 alone, involving three of the largest targeted AI-agent companies.

While 2025 featured headline-making deals like Google’s $32 billion Wiz acquisition and HPE’s $13.4 billion Juniper takeover, a series of targeted purchases involving emerging AI companies has more clearly demonstrated this shift. 

The following acquisitions capture how established players are absorbing specialised innovation across sectors.

OpenAI: Acquired Statsig for $1.1 Billion

In September, OpenAI acquired experimentation platform Statsig for $1.1 billion in an all-stock deal. 

Statsig offers A/B testing, feature flagging and real-time decisioning, and has been utilised by OpenAI in its product development. 

The platform will continue to operate independently from its Seattle office, with employees transitioning to OpenAI upon the acquisition’s closure.

Statsig’s founder, Vijaye Raji, became OpenAI’s CTO of applications, signalling a formal expansion of OpenAI’s product infrastructure. 

Workday: Acquired Sana for $1.1 billion 

In September, Workday announced it had entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Sana for approximately $1.1 billion in an all-cash transaction. 

Sana’s generative AI platform builds adaptive learning and knowledge management tools for enterprise HR and operations. 

Workday, used by over 65% of the Fortune 500 companies, is an enterprise AI solution that provides a unified platform for AI-driven HR and finance operations. 

Following the acquisition, Workday plans to integrate Sana’s capabilities into its existing suite, making AI assistance central to employee workflows. 

Meta: Acquired PlayAI (Undisclosed) 

In July, Meta Platforms acquired PlayAI, a US-based voice-AI startup focused on human-like speech generation. 

While the fee was not disclosed and neither was an official announcement made, a spokesperson from Meta confirmed the acquisition to Bloomberg. 

PlayAI team’s expertise in developing natural voices and an accessible voice creation platform aligns well with our initiatives and plans in AI characters, Meta AI, wearables and audio content development.

According to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg, the “entire PlayAI team” would join Meta. 

Grammarly: Acquired Superhuman 

In July, Grammarly announced a deal to acquire Superhuman, an AI-native email startup. Superhuman’s platform helps users respond faster and manage communication more efficiently, with measurable productivity gains across professional use cases. 

Grammarly plans to integrate its AI superhighway—which already operates across five lakh apps—with Superhuman’s agent-ready environment to orchestrate multi-agent collaboration within email.

“With Superhuman, we can deliver that future to millions more professionals while giving our existing users another surface for agent collaboration that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else,” said Shishir Malhotra, CEO of Grammarly. 

The company stated that email is the number one use case for Grammarly among professionals, with the tool helping revise over 50 million emails per week across more than 20 email providers. 

AMD: Acquired MK1 AI 

AMD acquired MK1 AI, an inference software startup founded by former Neuralink engineers, in November. 

The deal’s terms were undisclosed. MK1’s software stack optimises inference workloads across heterogeneous compute environments.

The acquisition strengthens AMD’s effort to deliver end-to-end AI solutions combining hardware and software optimisation, while also marking a strategic response to NVIDIA’s dominance in its software stack for GPUs. 

Databricks: Acquired Tecton 

Databricks announced its acquisition of Tecton in August to enhance its AI agent deployment capabilities.

“By uniting Tecton’s industry-leading real-time data serving with Agent Bricks, customers will be empowered to build, deploy and scale AI applications faster than ever before,” Databricks said in the announcement. 

Tecton is an enterprise feature store that helps enterprises leverage their mission-critical data to power AI agents for use cases like fraud detection, risk scoring and personalisation.

The acquisition will provide customers of Databricks with enhanced capabilities in their journey from raw data to production-grade AI agents. 

Cognition AI: Acquired Windsurf 

In July, Cognition AI, the company that has built the autonomous software engineering tool Devin, announced an agreement to acquire the AI coding platform Windsurf. 

This development followed Google DeepMind’s hiring of Windsurf’s CEO Varun Mohan, co‑founder Douglas Chen and key R&D personnel under a $2.4 billion licensing agreement.

Cognition said the combination of its AI agent Devin with Windsurf’s IDE platform will support developers in planning, delegating and executing code tasks within a single interface.

“Working side by side, we’ll soon enable you to plan tasks in an IDE powered by Devin’s codebase understanding, delegate chunks of work to multiple Devins in parallel, complete the highest-leverage parts yourself with the help of autocomplete and stitch it all back together in the same IDE,” the company said.

Wix: Acquired Base44 for $80 million

Acquisitions in 2025 also included several smaller, self-funded startups that achieved rapid product-market fit before being acquired. 

One notable example is Wix’s $80 million acquisition of Base44, a nine-month-old Israeli startup that built an AI-powered no-code app builder. Base44 allows users to create full applications using natural language prompts

Remarkably, Base44 was profitable at the time of acquisition, earning $189,000 in monthly profit with only six employees and no external investors. 

For Wix, the acquisition expands its AI-driven website and app development tools, positioning the company to compete in the growing market for natural-language-based software creation.

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