Venture-backed M&A value more than tripled to $2.54 billion in August from $775 million in July, thanks to Unilever‘s reported $1 billion acquisition of VC-backed Dollar Shave Club.
The deal, announced in July, closed in late August, according to preliminary data from Thomson Reuters.
In all, 21 U.S.-based venture-backed companies were acquired in August, with five of those disclosing their financials, adding up to more than $2.5 billion.
The second largest acquisition of the month behind the Dollar Shave Club exit was word-processing app Quip Inc, which was acquired by Salesforce for $647 million.
Dollar Shave Club now ranks as the fourth largest acquisition of a VC-backed company this year, behind the $10 billion AbbVie is paying in cash and stock for Stemcentrx, the $1.4 billion sale of Jasper Technologies to Cisco Systems and the $1.2 billion acquisition of Vantage Oncology by McKesson Specialty Health.
Not yet closed is the sale of the venture-backed online retailer Jet.com, which Wal-Mart Stores said in August it would buy for about $3 billion.
Of note during the VC-backed M&A activity in August was that Apple acquired Seattle-based Turi, which provides a machine-learning analytics engine for graph datasets.
The purchase was the fourth this year for Apple, which also agreed to buy FlyBy Media, which develops computer-vision technology; Learnsprout, which offers a learning platform for schools and districts; and Emotient, which provides facial-expression recognition and analysis technologies.
The financial terms of none of Apple’s acquisitions were disclosed.
Apple is not normally acquisitive; it did not purchase any VC-backed startups last year and it acquired only one in 2014, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Downloadable Data: venture-backed-ma-august-2016
Photo of exit sign by Alastair Goldfisher
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