DeepSeek's $15.9 billion round lifts October venture funding to $59 billion

October's venture numbers were shaped by an unusually small set of very large deals. Seven companies raised billion-dollar rounds, and those rounds alone accounted for just over 40% of the month's global total, according to Crunchbase. The bulk of the money went to companies in the U.S. and China, which raised $28 billion and $20.6 billion respectively. For China, it was the first month above $20 billion in single-month investment since June 2018, when Ant Group raised $14 billion in its Series C funding.

DeepSeek's round stands out even within that concentrated group. At a $90 billion valuation, the company becomes the second most highly valued Chinese company after ByteDance, and the third most highly valued private frontier lab after Anthropic and OpenAI. The deal also places DeepSeek among the Top 10 most highly funded private companies, per Crunchbase. Beyond DeepSeek, other large rounds went to manufacturing startup Re:Build ($2.1 billion), power and grid capacity provider Axiom ($2 billion), spend-management platform Ramp ($1.85 billion), open-source semiconductor company Tenstorrent ($1.5 billion), prediction market Kalshi ($1 billion), and frontier lab Flapping Airplanes ($1 billion).

The month also highlighted how much of venture funding is now AI-driven: AI companies captured two-thirds of global funding in October, with semiconductor companies gaining market share. Looking ahead, the U.S. IPO market was slow in anticipation of Anthropic's November IPO, which could surpass SpaceX's record-setting June listing that raised $85.7 billion. With two months remaining, 2026 has already set records for acquisitions, IPOs and funding rounds across major venture markets, and the question heading into year-end is how widely that momentum will spread.