These three questions fit the dataset's grain (one row per funding deal, 2015–2020) and the decisions it could support. I ran the evidence for the first two. The third I checked only for feasibility. ## 1. Is Indian startup funding accelerating or slowing, and is it shifting from many small deals to fewer large ones? The query by year shows a clear pattern. - **Deal count peaked in 2016 and then fell:** 935 deals in 2015, 993 in 2016, 687 in 2017, 310 in 2018 and 111 in 2019. - **Median disclosed ticket rose over the same period:** about $1.5M in 2015, $1.0M in 2016, $2.25M in 2017, $4M in 2018 and $12M in 2019. - **The pattern suggests consolidation:** fewer, larger rounds. Total disclosed dollars were not monotonic: roughly $8.6B in 2015, $10.4B in 2017, $5.1B in 2018 and $9.7B in 2019. Caveats: - **2016 total is unreliable.** The 2016 dollar total came back as `nan`, so some amounts there are malformed. - **Falling counts may be reporting decay.** The decline could reflect fewer deals being captured rather than fewer deals happening. - **2020 is nearly empty.** It has only 7 deals, so it is not a usable year. ## 2. Which cities really dominate startup funding once city names are cleaned up? The city field is fragmented by aliases, which hides the true concentration. - **Bengaluru:** "Bangalore" has 700 deals and about $11.4B disclosed, and "Bengaluru" adds 141 deals and about $7.1B. Together that is 841 deals and about $18.5B, well ahead of every other city. - **Delhi NCR:** this is split across "New Delhi" (421), "Delhi" (34), "Gurgaon" (287), "Gurugram" (50) and "Noida" (92), which sums to 884 deals. Merged, Delhi NCR competes with or exceeds Bengaluru on deal count. - **Mumbai:** 567 deals, with a median ticket of $2M. - **Missing city:** 171 deals have no city at all. This matters for deciding where to launch or source deals. The cleaned view also lets you compare median ticket size by hub, for example Bengaluru versus Pune or Hyderabad. ## 3. What does a typical raise look like by round type and vertical, and who funds it? This is the benchmarking question for founders and investors: how much to raise, at which stage, in which sector, and which investors to approach. - **Feasibility:** every deal row has an investor field. There are 57 distinct round types, 822 distinct verticals and about 2,459 distinct startups. - **Limits:** only 2,066 of 3,044 deals (about 68%) have a numeric amount, so any ticket-size benchmark rests on disclosed deals only. - **Cleaning needed:** the vertical and round-type labels need normalising before the comparison is meaningful. I didn't run this breakdown, so I have no figures for it. ## Data quality to keep in mind - Several dates are malformed. Seven rows are unparsed, and one row parses to the year 0015. - About a third of amounts are non-numeric or undisclosed. - Free-text categories (cities, verticals, round types) are inconsistent.