# Three analytical questions this dataset can answer The dataset has 3,044 funding deals, 2,459 distinct startups, 115 cities, 822 verticals and 57 round types. Dates run from 2015 to January 2020. I profiled the data and ran yearly and city summaries, but I did not run any vertical or round-type breakdown. The third question below is therefore a recommendation, not a finding. ## 1. Did Indian startup funding shift from many small deals to fewer, larger ones? This is the strongest signal in the data. | Year | Deals | Deals with amount | Median ticket (USD) | |---|---|---|---| | 2015 | ~935 | 646 | 1.5M | | 2016 | 993 | 587 | 1.0M | | 2017 | 687 | 456 | 2.25M | | 2018 | ~310 | 265 | ~4.0M | | 2019 | 111 | 104 | 12.0M | | 2020 | 7 | 7 | 9.0M | - Deal count falls from 993 in 2016 to 111 in 2019, while the median ticket rises roughly twelvefold. - Yearly totals stay in a similar range where they can be computed: 8.6B in 2015, 10.4B in 2017, 5.1B in 2018 and 9.7B in 2019. - **What it leaves open:** this could be a collection artifact. The dataset may simply record fewer small deals in later years. - **Disclosure is uneven:** only 646 of ~935 deals (69%) disclosed an amount in 2015, against 104 of 111 (94%) in 2019. - **Missing total:** the 2016 total comes back as `nan`, so at least one amount value is bad. That year is missing from any total-funding comparison. - **Small samples:** 2020 has only 7 deals and 2019 only 111, so those medians are fragile. ## 2. Which hubs capture the most deals and capital, once city aliases are merged? Raw city results split the same place under several names: - Bangalore (700 deals) and Bengaluru (141) - Gurgaon (287) and Gurugram (50) - New Delhi (421) and Delhi (34) Merging only the aliases visible in the top-15 output gives: - **Bangalore + Bengaluru:** 841 deals and about 18.5B USD disclosed. The median is 2M in the Bangalore rows and 5M in the Bengaluru rows. - **Delhi NCR** (New Delhi, Gurgaon, Noida, Gurugram, Delhi): 884 deals but only about 8.4B USD. So NCR has more deals but less than half of Bangalore's disclosed capital. That suggests Bangalore deals are larger or more concentrated in a few big rounds. **What it leaves open:** - Mumbai (567 deals) has a `nan` total, so it cannot be ranked on capital. - 171 deals have no city at all. - Only the top 15 cities were shown, and the other 100 or so were not examined. - The totals could be dominated by a handful of mega-deals. I did not check for that. ## 3. Which verticals and funding stages drive ticket size and growth? I did not run this analysis, but the dataset is set up for it. The profile shows 822 distinct verticals and 57 round types. - **Verticals need cleaning first.** 2015 shows 724 distinct verticals across about 929 deals, while 2016 shows 19 across 993. That looks like inconsistent free-text labeling in one period, not a real change in the market. - **Once cleaned, the useful questions are:** - Which verticals are growing in share? - Which stages (seed through late) account for the rising median ticket in question 1? - Does stage mix explain the shift toward larger deals? ## Data-quality caveats - Only 2,066 of 3,044 amounts (68%) are numeric, so every funding figure rests on that subset. - One record is dated year "0015", and 7 dates could not be parsed. - Year counts differ slightly between queries (2015 shows 929, 933 or 935; 2018 shows 309 or 310) because of how those dates were handled. - Several queries returned unparseable results, so some checks I attempted are missing.