**Yes, there is a time dimension, and it shows a few clear spikes, a long decline in deal count, and several breaks in the data itself.** The monthly figures come from the Date column. They cover 62 + 12 month buckets, including two malformed ones. **Spikes in deal value (total USD)** - **July 2015 is the biggest outlier, at about $9.83B.** That is roughly 10x a typical 2015 month, and it came from only 72 deals with an amount. The median that month was $5M, so a few mega-deals drove the total. - Other value spikes are also driven by a few large rounds, not by more deals: - Aug 2019: about $4.53B - Aug 2017: about $2.75B (only 26 deals with an amount, and a median of $0.82M) - Mar 2017: about $2.26B - Nov 2019: about $2.06B - May 2017: about $1.79B - Sep 2015: about $1.47B - Feb 2018: about $1.21B - In most other months the total sits between $0.1B and $1B. - Median ticket size spikes in small-sample months: $30M in Sep 2018 (11 deals with an amount) and $22M in Jan 2019 (3 deals). These reflect thin data, not a real jump in typical deal size. **Dips and long-run decline in deal count** - Activity peaked in 2015–early 2016, at 86–104 deals a month. The maximum was 104 in Jan 2016. - From mid-2016 it fell steadily: - Jul 2016: 64 deals - 2017: mostly 45–72 deals a month, with 48 in Feb and 43 in Jul - Early 2018: 35–42 deals a month - May 2018: 23 deals - The sharpest drop is in late 2018: 13 deals in Sep, 7 in Oct, 18 in Nov and 7 in Dec. Jan 2019 has only 3. - Typical deal size was not falling over this period. The median rose from about $1M in 2016 to about $2–5M in 2017–2018. So the decline is in deal count, not ticket size. **Breaks and data-quality issues** - Two malformed date buckets exist: - `0015-07` has 1 deal ($0.63M), which looks like a typo for 2015. - `-00` has 7 deals ($10.2M) with an unparseable date. - March 2019 is missing entirely. The months run 2019-02, then 2019-04. - The series ends at Jan 2020. - From 2019 onward the amounts carry fractional values (e.g. 115.793355M, 297.15271022M), unlike earlier whole-number amounts. Deal counts rebound to 9–17 a month but stay far below the 2015–16 levels. This suggests a change in source or coverage around 2018–19. **How to read it** - The decline in deal count from 2016 is a genuine trend in this data, but part of the late-2018 collapse may be incomplete coverage. - Value spikes should be treated as outlier-driven. Use medians, or exclude the top few deals, before reading them as sector-wide trends. Everything above comes from the monthly aggregation queries already run, covering deals, deals with an amount, total USD and median USD per month.