## Notable spikes, dips and breaks in funding activity The dataset has a monthly time axis running from 2015 to early 2020. Deal counts and dollar totals behave very differently over that span, and the date field has some breaks. **Deal volume (the structural trend)** - Volume peaked in late 2015 and early 2016. It was 96–98 deals a month in Jul–Aug 2015, and 104 in Jan 2016, the highest month (step-0). - It then declined steadily, to about 72 a month by late 2016 and 43 by Jul 2017 (step-0). - It fell to 35 or fewer a month through most of 2018. Sep 2018 had 13 deals, and Oct and Dec 2018 had only 7 each (step-0). - Jan 2019 had 3 deals and Feb 2019 had 3 (step-4). Mar 2019 does not appear in the results at all (steps 1 and 4), so there is a gap. - From Apr 2019 the counts jump back to 9–17 a month (step-1). The format of the amounts also changes, with decimal values like 115.793355M instead of round numbers. This looks like a change in source or coverage rather than a real recovery, but I did not verify that. **Dollar totals (dominated by a few mega-deals)** - **Jul 2015 is the biggest spike.** It totals about $9.83B, against roughly $0.3–1.5B in neighbouring months (step-2). The median deal that month was only $5M, so a handful of huge deals drive it. A different amount-parsing variant in step-3 puts the same month at about $1.53B, so a few extreme or malformed amounts are probably inflating the figure. Treat it with caution. - Other spikes came in the same way, with high totals but ordinary medians: - Aug 2017: $2.75B across 45 deals, median $0.82M. - Mar 2017: $2.26B. - May 2017: $1.79B. - Sep 2015: $1.47B. - Feb 2018: $1.21B. - Later months also spike: Aug 2019 at $4.53B and Nov 2019 at $2.06B (step-1). - Quiet troughs occurred in Oct 2015 ($255M) and in Oct and Dec 2018 ($52.9M and $57.7M). The deal count in those 2018 months was only 7 each, so the dips come from thin deal flow (steps 0 and 4). **Deal size is moving the other way** - The median disclosed deal was about $0.4–1.4M through 2016. It rose to $3–4.8M in late 2017 and 2018 (step-0). - There was a median spike of $30M in Sep 2018 (11 deals with amounts) and $22M in Jan 2019 (3 deals). These samples are too small to read as real trends. - Overall, fewer deals were being done but at larger sizes. **Data-quality breaks in the date field** - One deal is dated `0015-07`, evidently a typo for 2015-07 ($0.63M; step-0). - Seven rows have a malformed month (`-00`) totalling $10.23M (step-1). - The card flags a stray non-breaking-space character in the date range. Some dates are also non-zero-padded, such as `10/7/2015`. - Disclosure is incomplete throughout. Many months have 20–40% of deals with no amount, for example Apr 2016 with 38 of 79 (step-0). Totals and medians therefore reflect only the disclosed deals. ```json {"charts":[{"kind":"line","x":"month","series":["deals"],"title":"Monthly funding deals"}]} ```