## Summary Deal activity peaked in 2015–early 2016, then declined steadily. Funding dollars are dominated by a few mega-deal months. There is also a data break around early 2019. The monthly figures come from the queries above; the result tables show the numbers. ### Deal-count shape - **Peak:** deal counts rose from about 51 in Jan 2015 to 86–98 a month by mid-2015. January 2016 was the high, at 104 deals. - **Decline:** counts fell to 64 in Jul 2016, 48 in Feb 2017 and 43 in Jul 2017. They stayed in the 30s through early 2018. - **Collapse in late 2018:** counts dropped to 23 in May 2018, 13 in Sep 2018, and 7 in both Oct and Dec 2018. - **Likely coverage issue:** the late-2018 and early-2019 drop (3 deals in each of Jan and Feb 2019) may partly reflect thinner data collection rather than a real market collapse. I can't tell from this dataset alone. ### Dollar-volume spikes Monthly totals are mostly $200M–$1B, but a few months stand far above that: - **Jul 2015: about $9.8B.** This is the biggest spike by far. The median deal that month was only $5M, so a handful of very large deals drove it. I did not identify which ones. - **Aug 2017: about $2.75B**, with a median of only $0.82M, so it is also outlier-driven. - **Mar 2017: about $2.26B** and **May 2017: about $1.79B.** - **Feb 2018: about $1.21B.** - **Aug 2019: about $4.5B** and **Nov 2019: about $2.06B.** Total dollars are therefore not a reliable trend signal. Medians and counts are steadier. ### Dips - **Dollar volume:** the lowest months are Oct 2018 (about $53M), Dec 2018 (about $58M) and May 2018 (about $106M). The 2018 lows coincide with the deal-count collapse. - **Typical deal size:** the median rose from about $1M in 2016 to $3–5M in late 2017 and 2018. In Sep 2018 it was $30M on 11 deals, and in Jan 2019 it was $22M on 3 deals. Fewer deals were reported, and the ones reported were larger. This may be partly because small deals were less well recorded. ### Breaks and data-quality issues - **Stray date:** one row falls in "0015-07", a mistyped year 2015, with 1 deal and $0.63M. Some queries fold it into July 2015, which changes that month's count from 96 to 97. - **Unparseable dates:** 7 deals, worth about $10M, have an unusable month (shown as "-00"). They cannot be placed on the timeline. - **Gap in March 2019:** the month is missing entirely. The series then resumes in Apr 2019 at 14 deals, a higher level than Jan–Feb 2019 (3 each). - **End of coverage:** the data runs through Jan 2020, with 7 deals. - **Parsing sensitivity:** when I parsed amounts differently, July 2015 fell from about $9.8B to about $1.5B. One query also returned a NaN total for Jul 2016. The July 2015 spike therefore depends on how a few large or oddly formatted amounts are read, and should be checked before it is quoted. - **Missing amounts:** many deals have no amount. In 2016, for example, only about 40–57 of 64–104 deals have one. Totals understate real volume.