This report uses the Signalrank Codex and Claude agents to query SignalRank Intelligence data. It is written by the agents and read and edited by myself before publishing.
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Executive Summary
October’s headline hides a weaker market underneath. SignalRank recorded $51.66B of venture capital across 867 rounds with disclosed amounts, out of 1,219 eligible rounds. That is down 4.7% from September’s $54.20B and up 40.4% from $36.81B in October 2025.
One deal explains the year-over-year gain. DeepSeek’s $15.88B Series B was 30.7% of the month’s capital. Six rounds of at least $1B took $23.23B, or 45.0% of the total.
Strip those six out and the market raised $28.43B. That is 12.0% below September and 1.2% below a year earlier. Disclosed round counts also fell, to 867 from 1,097 in September and 1,323 a year ago, although October’s count is the one most likely to rise as late reports arrive.
Market Pulse
September had more billion-dollar rounds than October, 11 against 6, but less of its capital came from them: $21.89B, or 40.4%. October’s concentration comes down to the size of one round.
The ten largest rounds took 51.1% of capital. The remaining 817 rounds shared 27.1%.
Two deals need context. Axiom Solutions International’s $2.00B is preferred stock in Flex’s cloud and power infrastructure unit ahead of a planned separation, which makes it a corporate carve-out more than a startup Series A. Cohere is missing because its Series E first close had no published amount, so it counts as a round here but adds no capital.
For a longer view, Crunchbase News counted a record 27 companies raising $1B or more in the third quarter, and its More Money, Fewer Checks piece looks at the gap between dollars and deal counts.
Stage-by-Stage View
Series B shows the distortion most clearly. It took $20.37B across 64 disclosed rounds, out of 73 in total, and DeepSeek was 77.9% of that. Without DeepSeek, Series B raised $4.49B, below September’s $5.22B. The median disclosed Series B was $41.9M, up from $33.0M. Crunchbase News recently described a similar split in US Series B, with dollars high and deal counts low.
Series A raised $8.45B across 175 disclosed rounds, out of 208 in total. Axiom, Flapping Airplanes and TypeSafe AI accounted for 45.8% of it. The median was $15.0M, close to September’s $15.5M, so the typical Series A barely moved.
Later stages cooled. Series C fell to $2.55B from $7.37B, and Series D fell to $3.53B from $8.44B. Series E and beyond raised $7.00B against $11.22B.
Seed raised $3.12B across 281 disclosed rounds, out of 384 in total, with a median of $3.9M against $3.1M in September. Pre-seed had 124 disclosed rounds out of 152, with a median of $1.2M against $0.5M. Treat both increases with care: small rounds tend to be reported late, so the medians may fall as they arrive.
Disclosure varies widely by stage. Only 27 of 107 corporate rounds and 33 of 67 SAFE rounds published an amount.
Geography View
China raised $19.59B across 52 rounds, against $3.55B across 66 in September. Excluding DeepSeek it raised $3.71B, about level with the prior month. Hangzhou’s $15.90B on 4 rounds exceeded San Francisco ($5.90B on 100 rounds) and New York ($5.52B on 56) combined.
The US raised $24.07B across 345 rounds, down from $31.18B across 417. Excluding mega-rounds it was flat, at $16.72B against $16.78B, so almost all of the decline came from very large deals. Austin’s $2.86B is mostly Axiom.
Europe raised $4.37B with no rounds of $1B or more, against $6.79B excluding mega-rounds in September. The UK moved the other way, to $1.62B across 75 rounds from $1.01B across 85. Asia excluding mega-rounds slipped to $6.22B from $7.67B.
Who Is Winning
Sector breakdown
AI-tagged companies raised $35.13B across 333 rounds, or 68.0% of capital. Excluding mega-rounds AI still took $13.91B, or 48.9%. Tags overlap, so these bars add up to more than the market total, and Science and Engineering and Data and Analytics rank high largely because DeepSeek carries those tags.
Health Care is the largest sector with no billion-dollar round: $5.71B across 144 rounds. Financial Services looks very different without Ramp and Kalshi, falling from $6.10B to $3.25B.
Lead investors
Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz each led 9 rounds, followed by General Catalyst with 8. Rounds that General Catalyst led totaled $2.99B; that is the full size of those rounds, and its own checks were smaller. A named lead appears on 749 of the 867 disclosed rounds.
Repeat investors
Y Combinator joined the most rounds, at 35, followed by Andreessen Horowitz at 23, General Catalyst at 16 and Sequoia Capital at 15. Round totals can mislead here too: IDG Capital joined 7 rounds worth $16.76B, and DeepSeek was most of that.
Smart money flow
The median investor score is zero at every stage, so the median says little. The share of participations from scored investors is more useful. It was 33.3% at Series B, 33.1% at Series A and 33.2% at pre-seed, then dropped to 22.9% at Series D and 20.9% at Series E. No Series G participation came from a scored investor.
SignalRank Qualifiers Snapshot
Ten Series B rounds met the SignalRank qualification model in October, raising $1.45B in total with a median of $89.0M.
Notes For:
VCs
Read the total and the ex-mega figure together. The total says the market grew from a year ago, while the ex-mega figure says it did not. Wait for next month’s restated counts before treating the 21.0% monthly drop in disclosed rounds as a real pullback.
Founders
The median Series A held near $15M while a few very large rounds pulled the stage’s capital up, so those headline rounds are a poor guide to what a typical company can raise. Crunchbase News published a guest column on the squeeze between seed and Series Athat is worth reading for planning a seed round.
LPs
A single round moved October’s global, Series B, China and AI totals. Check whether a manager’s reported market context reflects the broad market or a few outsized financings. Late-stage capital outside the largest deals is the number to watch, given October’s drop at Series C and Series D.
Methodology and Data Notes
Figures come from SignalRank’s data, extracted on November 3, 2026, with each round counted once. Capital, medians, geography and sector views cover rounds with disclosed amounts. Total Rounds in the stage table also includes rounds with no published amount.
October has had the least time to fill in, and early-stage rounds tend to arrive last. Comparisons with September and with October 2025 will probably narrow, especially round counts.
Mega-rounds are rounds of at least $1B. Some source records label a round by the event that preceded it; 102 such rounds worth $3.73B were included and assigned to their current equity stage. Debt, grants, secondary sales, private equity and post-IPO financing are excluded. The largest excluded categories were debt financing ($95.45B across 259 transactions), post-IPO debt ($92.74B across 72) and post-IPO equity ($55.62B across 65). That leaves out Anthropic’s $42.00B financing, which the source records as debt. Numbered follow-on rounds and extensions recorded under their own labels, such as second seed rounds, are also outside this scope: 152 transactions worth $2.39B.
Round data has no US state field, so the US table shows cities. “Safe” in the stage table refers to SAFE rounds. Capital shown for an investor is the full size of the rounds it joined or led.