**The time dimension is usable, but it has several spikes, a long decline in deal counts, and a few date breaks.** The monthly aggregates behind this are the query results above (62 monthly buckets from the main query, plus 12 more for 2019-02 onward). **Spikes in dollar volume** - **July 2015** is the largest spike in the main series. Total funding is about $9.83B, against a typical month of $0.2–1.0B. The median ticket that month is only $5M, so a handful of mega-deals drive the total, not broad activity. - This figure is fragile. A second pass over the same month gave only about $1.53B, because 10 fewer deals had a parseable amount (62 vs 72). Treat the $9.8B as dependent on a few large or oddly formatted values. - **Mid-2017 bursts:** March 2017 (~$2.26B), May 2017 (~$1.79B) and August 2017 (~$2.75B) each stand out against neighbouring months of $0.17–0.7B. August 2017 had only 45 deals and a median of $0.82M, so again a few very large cheques. - **February 2018** (~$1.21B) and **April 2015** (~$0.98B) are smaller spikes. - **2019:** August (~$4.53B) and November (~$2.06B) are far above the other 2019 months. August came from just 17 deals. **Dips and a long decline in deal counts** - Deal counts peak at about 100 a month from mid-2015 to early 2016 (104 in January 2016, 100 in February). They then decline steadily. - Late 2016 runs at 72–80 a month. - Late 2017 runs at 43–58. - By mid-2018 it is 23–35. - Late 2018 shows the lowest points: 13 in September, 7 in October and 7 in December. November 2018 rebounded to 18. - There is also a visible step down from February 2017 (48 deals) and July 2017 (43). - 2019 monthly deal counts are only 3–17. This looks like thinner coverage rather than a real market collapse, since dollar totals stay large. - Dollar totals fall less than counts do. Median ticket size rises from about $1M in 2015–2016 to $4–5M in several 2018 months, and to $30M in September 2018 (11 deals with amounts). That points to fewer, larger deals, but small sample sizes make it noisy. - Total funding is also lower in 2016 (about $0.19–0.70B a month) than in 2015. **Breaks and data-quality issues in the time axis** - **Malformed dates:** one deal is dated `0015-07`, a typo for 2015-07 with a $630K amount. Seven more deals fall in a `-00` bucket, with an unparseable date and about $10.2M. - **Missing amounts:** many months have far fewer deals with amounts than deals. Examples are April 2016 (38 of 79) and July 2017 (25 of 43), so totals understate activity unevenly. - **Parsing differences:** the two aggregations disagree in several months (for example July 2016 showed `nan` in one pass). The aggregation must be done carefully before comparing months. - **Coverage:** the series runs from January 2015 to January 2020, with the 2019 months sparse. In short, the dataset shows a deal-count peak around late 2015 to early 2016, a steady decline afterwards, and dollar spikes (July 2015, mid-2017, August 2019) that come from a few very large deals. Rely on deal counts and medians for trend, and treat monthly totals with caution.