Global venture funding in October totaled $59 billion, a 45% jump from a year earlier, per Crunchbase data — and one deal did much of the lifting.

China's DeepSeek raised $15.9 billion at a $90 billion valuation, which Crunchbase News reports is the largest-ever venture deal for a Chinese company and the largest private funding by a Chinese tech company on record.

The round places DeepSeek among the top 10 most highly funded private companies, makes it the second most highly valued Chinese company after ByteDance, and the third most valued private frontier lab behind Anthropic and OpenAI.

The surprise is not just the size but the geography.

Crunchbase data shows U.S. companies raised $28 billion in October while Chinese companies took $20.6 billion — and the last time more than $20 billion went into China in a single month was June 2018, when Ant Group raised its $14 billion Series C. A rival open-source lab, Moonshot AI, reportedly reached a $50 billion value in October, per Crunchbase News, making it the 11th most valuable private company on the Crunchbase Unicorn Board, and has reportedly confidentially filed to go public in Hong Kong.

October also saw two other frontier labs raise blockbuster Series A rounds at or close to $1 billion.

Crunchbase's data shows just how top-heavy October was: seven companies raising billion-dollar rounds accounted for just over 40% of the month's funding, and 66% of global funding went to AI-driven companies, with semiconductor companies gaining share.

The other mega-rounds went to Axiom ($2 billion for data center power), spend-management platform Ramp ($1.85 billion, with $2 billion in ARR), open-source chipmaker Tenstorrent ($1.5 billion Series E) and prediction-market Kalshi ($1 billion Series E).

Even the month's second-largest deal wasn't AI: manufacturing startup Re:Build raised $2.1 billion, which The Boston Globe reports is a record venture round for Massachusetts, led by General Catalyst with first-time investor JPMorgan Chase.

2026 has already set records for acquisitions, IPOs and funding rounds across major venture markets, and October extended that momentum while underscoring the concentration of this cycle.

On the exits side, the U.S. IPO market slowed in anticipation of Anthropic's November listing, which Crunchbase News notes could surpass even SpaceX's record-setting June IPO that raised $85.7 billion; at least nine venture-backed companies were acquired for more than $1 billion in October, including Uber's $2.3 billion purchase of 19-year-old ezCater.

The open question heading into December is whether the momentum spreads beyond a handful of mega-deals.

Re:Build, which has raised more than $4 billion in equity since its 2020 founding, told The Boston Globe its goal is making 'the next generation of things' in the U.S. — a bet that capital is now flowing outside AI too.