# Overall trend over time: shrinking deal volume **Short answer:** The dataset has a time dimension (monthly and yearly, 2015 to early 2020). Deal **count** shrinks steadily and sharply after a 2015–2016 peak. Dollar totals are volatile with no clear trend. Median deal size rises. ## Deal counts by year (supported by data) | Year | Deals | Deals with amount | Median deal (USD) | |---|---|---|---| | 2015 | 929–935 | 642–652 | 1.5M | | 2016 | 993 | 586–587 | 1.0M | | 2017 | 687 | 456 | 2.25M | | 2018 | 309–310 | 264–265 | 3.9–4.0M | | 2019 | 111 | 104–105 | 12.0M | | 2020 | 7 | 7 | 9.0M | The small differences between result sets (for example, 929 vs 935 deals in 2015) come from how each query parsed the messy date strings. Some rows have malformed dates and were handled differently by each query. One extra row has a blank or garbled year, and one has the year parsed as "15". - Deals rose slightly from 2015 to 2016, then fell by about 31% in 2017, by about 55% in 2018, and by about 64% in 2019. - The monthly data shows the same pattern. Counts reached 97–104 per month in mid-2015 to early 2016, fell to 43–72 per month through 2017, and dropped to 35 or fewer in most of 2018. Late 2018 and early 2019 were at single digits or low teens (for example, 7 in Oct 2018, 7 in Dec 2018, and 3 each in Jan and Feb 2019). - 2019 and 2020 are likely incomplete or thinly covered. The 2020 rows span only 2–13 Jan, and the monthly sample ends in Feb 2019. The late decline may therefore partly reflect data collection rather than real market activity. ## Dollar totals (volatile, no clear trend) - Yearly totals from the queries that returned them: about 8.6B (2015, one query) or 16.9B (another query), 3.8B (2016, one query only), 10.4B (2017), 5.1B (2018) and 9.7B (2019). - The two 2015 totals disagree (8.60B vs 16.89B), and 2016 is `nan` in two of the results. I can't say which 2015 figure is right, and the 2016 total is only partly reliable. - Monthly totals swing widely, from about 53M (Oct 2018) to about 2.75B (Aug 2017). A few very large deals appear to drive these swings. The totals show no consistent growth or decline. ## Median deal size (rising) The median rose from about 1.0–1.5M in 2015–2016 to 2.25M in 2017, about 4M in 2018, and 12M in 2019. As deal counts shrink, the remaining deals are larger. This could also reflect a shift toward better-reported amounts, since 2019 has almost every deal with an amount. ## Seasonality (weak evidence) I found no clear, repeating seasonal pattern. Mid-2015 was a local high (Jun–Aug), but the long-term decline dominates and the series is too short to separate seasonality from trend. Monthly counts alone don't support a seasonal conclusion. ## Caveats - Several of my queries failed on malformed date strings (such as "05/072018"), so I couldn't build a cleaned, consistent year-by-year or month-by-month view. - The monthly table was a 50-row sample of 60 matching rows, so the last months are not shown. - Missing (`nan`) totals in July 2016 and for 2016 as a whole mean dollar-based comparisons involving those periods are unreliable. **Bottom line:** Deal activity is clearly **shrinking** from 2016 onward. Total funding is **volatile and flat-to-unclear**. Average deal size is **growing**. Seasonality is not detectable from this evidence.