Seven deals take over 40% of October's $59 billion global venture funding

Crunchbase put October's global venture funding at $59 billion, up 45% from a year earlier. US startups raised $28 billion and Chinese startups $20.6 billion. The last time China drew more than $20 billion in a month was June 2018, when Ant Group raised $14 billion in its Series C. AI-driven companies took 66% of the global total. Crunchbase excluded Cohere's announced $5 billion target from the October total because the company had not reported an initial or final close.

The seven deals

The month's headline total rested on seven billion-dollar rounds, which accounted for just over 40% of the funding. Crunchbase said the money went to frontier labs, manufacturing, energy, semiconductors, prediction markets and spend management software. Private equity led much of this funding, alongside multistage firms including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures and Lux Capital, according to the report.

DeepSeek's $15.9 billion round at a $90 billion valuation was the largest private funding by a Chinese tech company on record, Crunchbase said. The deal placed DeepSeek among the top 10 most highly funded private companies. It also made DeepSeek the second most highly valued Chinese company after ByteDance and the third most highly valued private frontier lab after Anthropic and OpenAI.

Crunchbase also said Moonshot AI, a rival Chinese open-source lab, reportedly reached a $50 billion valuation in October, the 11th most valuable private company on Crunchbase's Unicorn Board, and confidentially filed to list in Hong Kong. Moonshot was not part of the seven-deal group Crunchbase counted for the 40% concentration figure.

The other large rounds on Crunchbase's list were spread across sectors. Re:Build, a Massachusetts-based manufacturing startup, raised the second-largest round at $2.1 billion. Axiom raised $2 billion for power and grid capacity for data centers. Ramp, a spend-management platform, raised $1.85 billion and said its annual recurring revenue reached $2 billion. Tenstorrent, an open-source semiconductor company, says it raised a $1.5 billion Series E. Kalshi, a prediction market, raised a $1 billion Series E, and Flapping Airplanes raised a $1 billion Series A. DeepSeek and Flapping Airplanes are frontier labs.

Crunchbase said a further eight companies raised more than $500 million in October, across frontier labs, robotics, legal, chips, agentic AI and healthcare. One of them, TypeSafe AI, says it raised an $870 million Series A.

What it means

Seven deals supplied more than 40% of October's funding. That leaves the market dependent on a small group of very large rounds rather than broad demand. Crunchbase said the question heading into year-end is how widely that momentum will spread.