China’s DeepSeek pushes October venture funding to $59B

Global venture funding reached $59 billion in October, up 45% from a year earlier, according to Crunchbase News. Much of the increase came from one deal: Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's $15.9 billion round, which Crunchbase called the largest venture deal ever for a Chinese company. The month showed how concentrated startup investing has become. Seven companies that raised billion-dollar rounds took in just over 40% of all venture money, and AI-driven companies captured 66% of global funding, Crunchbase reported.news.crunchbase.com

China's record month

Crunchbase said DeepSeek raised its round at a $90 billion valuation. That makes it the most valuable Chinese company after ByteDance and the third most valuable private frontier lab, behind Anthropic and OpenAI, according to Crunchbase. DeepSeek has not publicly confirmed the round. Bloomberg and Reuters first reported a raise of about 100 billion yuan on October 22, and later accounts put the total higher, GEroundtable noted. Trivium China reported that the company raised 105.5 billion yuan from nearly 30 investors and that state-backed investors supplied 27% of it, according to Trivium China. Reported backers include Tencent and CATL Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited, per The Terminal.theterminal.space+3

U.S. companies raised $28 billion in October and Chinese companies raised $20.6 billion. China had not drawn more than $20 billion in a single month since June 2018, when Ant Group raised $14 billion, Crunchbase said. Rival Chinese lab Moonshot AI also reportedly reached a $50 billion valuation during the month.news.crunchbase.com

Other billion-dollar rounds

The other billion-dollar rounds spanned manufacturing, energy, fintech and chips. Manufacturing startup Re:Build raised $2.1 billion and Axiom raised $2 billion to build power capacity for data centers, Crunchbase reported. Spend-management company Ramp raised $1.85 billion, chipmaker Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion, and prediction market Kalshi and frontier lab Flapping Airplanes each raised $1 billion. Eight more companies raised rounds above $500 million.news.crunchbase.com

Concentration and the IPO test

The October figures follow a longer trend. Global venture investment neared $680 billion through the first three quarters of 2026, much of it in very large AI rounds, while North American deal counts fell 16% year over year in the third quarter, Benzinga reported, citing Crunchbase data.benzinga.com

The U.S. IPO market slowed in October ahead of Anthropic's planned November listing, according to Crunchbase. At least nine venture-backed companies were acquired for more than $1 billion each, including Uber's ↗ 7.37% $2.3 billion purchase of ezCater. Crunchbase framed the open question for the rest of the year as "how widely that momentum will spread."news.crunchbase.com