**Short answer:** the data has a time dimension (deal date, Jan 2015 to Jan 2020), and it shows three things: a few huge one-month dollar spikes, a long decline in deal counts, and breaks in coverage in late 2018 to 2019. **1. Dollar spikes (a few mega-deals, not broad surges)** - **July 2015** is the largest spike, at about $9.8B across 96 deals. Typical deal sizes were also higher that month (median $5.0M against about $1M in neighbouring months). - **August 2019** is about $4.5B from only 17 deals, so it is driven by a handful of very large rounds. - Other peaks are Aug 2017 (about $2.7B), Mar 2017 (about $2.3B), Nov 2019 (about $2.1B), May 2017 (about $1.8B) and Sep 2015 (about $1.5B). - In most of these months the median deal stays at about $1–3M. The totals are therefore dominated by single outliers, and the monthly sum is a poor guide to funding momentum. **2. Deal-count trend: rise, plateau, long decline** - Deals rose from about 51 a month in Jan 2015 to about 86–98 a month from mid-2015. The peak was 104 in Jan 2016. - From mid-2016 the count slid: 64–87 a month in late 2016, 43–72 a month through 2017, and 23–42 a month in the first half of 2018. - Notable dips are Feb 2017 (48, against 72 the month before), Jul 2017 (43) and Jul 2016 (64). - After Aug 2018 the count collapses: 13 in Sep 2018, 7 in Oct, 18 in Nov, 7 in Dec 2018, then 3 in Jan 2019 and 3 in Feb 2019. - In the later months the median deal size looks high (30.0 in Sep 2018, 22.0 in Jan 2019). That is probably because very few deals have amounts, so I would not read it as a real shift to bigger rounds. **3. Breaks and quality issues** - **Missing month:** March 2019 has no rows at all. The series runs Feb 2019 (3 deals) and then jumps to Apr 2019 (14 deals). - **Rebound after the gap:** 2019 deal counts return to 9–17 a month but stay well below the 2015–16 level. The late-2018 and early-2019 trough therefore looks more like thin or incomplete coverage than a real market collapse. - **Malformed dates:** one deal parses as `0015-07` and seven parse as `-00`, with about $10.2M in total. The date column is dd/mm/yyyy text with stray non-breaking-space characters, so a few dates are unusable and fall outside the real timeline. - **Missing amounts:** many deals have no amount. For example, in Jul 2017 only 25 of 43 deals have one, and the share is lower in 2016 than in 2018. Totals and medians are therefore based on partial data. - **Coverage:** the series ends in Jan 2020 with 7 deals, so the last month is likely partial. Because dollar totals are so outlier-driven and counts fall sharply from late 2018, the most reliable reading is that deal activity peaked in 2015–early 2016 and slowed through 2017–2018. I would treat the post-Aug 2018 numbers as a possible data-completeness problem rather than a confirmed downturn.