October's $59 Billion Venture Total Is Up 45%, and DeepSeek Alone Explains Most of the Gain

Global venture funding reached $59 billion in October 2026, up 45 percent from a year earlier, Crunchbase News reported. One deal sits inside that number: DeepSeek's $15.9 billion round, which Crunchbase says values the Hangzhou lab at $90 billion.

The headline growth rate is real, but it describes one company. Remove DeepSeek and the month looks like a normal strong one, with the money concentrated in a handful of other very large cheques.

How much of the $59 billion is DeepSeek

Crunchbase puts US companies at $28 billion and Chinese companies at $20.6 billion for the month. It says China had not seen more than $20 billion in a single month since June 2018, when Ant Group's $14 billion Series C landed.

DeepSeek is $15.9 billion of China's $20.6 billion. That leaves about $4.7 billion for every other Chinese startup combined, and about $43.1 billion for global funding ex-DeepSeek.

The year-earlier base follows from Crunchbase's growth rate: $59 billion divided by 1.45 is about $40.7 billion. Against that, $43.1 billion is a rise of about 6 percent. This is the author's calculation, and it assumes Crunchbase's October total includes the full $15.9 billion, which its text implies but does not itemise.

1. DeepSeek15.9 $B
2. Re:Build2.1 $B
3. Axiom2 $B
4. Ramp1.85 $B
5. Tenstorrent1.5 $B
6. Kalshi1 $B
7. Flapping Airplanes1 $B

Source: Crunchbase News, October 2026 global funding recap, accessed 2026-11-03

Those seven rounds sum to $25.35 billion, which is 43 percent of the month and matches Crunchbase's own "just over 40%". Eight more companies raised over $500 million each, led by TypeSafe AI's $870 million Series A.

There is a fair objection to subtracting DeepSeek. Large rounds are part of what venture funding is, and a year-earlier October may have had its own outliers that this comparison leaves in the base. Crunchbase does not list the prior October's biggest deals in the recap, so the 6 percent figure is a rough floor for the underlying trend, not a measurement of it.

The composition still matters. The six other billion-dollar rounds total $9.45 billion. That is real money, and it is spread across data-centre power (Axiom, $2 billion), chips (Tenstorrent, $1.5 billion), corporate spend software (Ramp, $1.85 billion, with $2 billion in annual recurring revenue by the company's own count) and prediction markets (Kalshi, $1 billion).

Why DeepSeek's valuation reads $90 billion and $75 billion

The reported valuations look inconsistent until the pre-money and post-money labels are separated. Reuters reported on October 22, via The Standard, that the round was about 100 billion yuan ($14.98 billion), nearly complete, at 500 billion yuan before the new capital. Bloomberg gave $15 billion.

At the exchange rate implied by Reuters' own pair of figures, 500 billion yuan is about $74.9 billion. Add $15.9 billion and the post-money is about $90.8 billion, which matches Crunchbase. The two figures are the same deal read before and after the money goes in.

The step up is steep. TechCrunch recorded a June round of more than $7 billion at $50 billion, citing Reuters, and July talks for $1.5 billion at about $71 billion. October's pre-money alone is above both.

Who is in, and the US restriction

Reuters named CATL and Tencent as the biggest backers, with Midea, Meituan, Geely and GigaDevice as new investors, and Boyu Capital, CPE, Legend Capital and existing holder IDG Capital also in, for more than 15 investors in all. The original target was 50 billion yuan; the round doubled it.

Two days before the Bloomberg report, TechCrunch says, the US ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek's technology from their systems. The round closed into that. TechCrunch adds that Liang Wenfeng, who founded the company in 2023, reportedly keeps an estimated 81.6 percent of the Chinese operating entity, per WireScreen's analysis of ownership data, a figure that predates this round.

Reuters also reported in September that DeepSeek hired CITIC Securities to prepare for a possible STAR Market listing.

What the rest of October looks like

Crunchbase says 66 percent of global funding went to AI-driven companies and that semiconductor companies gained share. At least nine venture-backed companies were bought for more than $1 billion, including Uber's $2.3 billion acquisition of ezCater.

The prediction-market company Kalshi, one of the seven billion-dollar rounds, was covered on the site at a $40 billion valuation, about ten times revenue. Elsewhere on the AI side, Anthropic's Q3 revenue gain is shrinking, which is the number that private valuations at these levels ultimately lean on.

Measure	October 2026	Source
Global total	$59 billion	Crunchbase
Year-on-year	+45%	Crunchbase
US / China	$28B / $20.6B	Crunchbase
DeepSeek round	$15.9B	Crunchbase
Ex-DeepSeek total	about $43.1B	The Terminal arithmetic

What would change the reading

The test is November. If DeepSeek's round is booked in October, November faces a tough comparison and a headline drop is likely regardless of conditions. A second month of ex-DeepSeek totals near $43 billion would say the market is steady, and a year-on-year gain above 6 percent without a single $10 billion cheque would say it is accelerating.