China’s Largest Startup Deal Ever Lifts Global Venture Funding To $59B In October

anthropic — global venture funding in October totaled $59 billion, a 45% jump from a year earlier, per Crunchbase data, in large part due to a record-setting deal for China’s DeepSeek. The company’s $15.9 billion funding round marked the largest-ever venture deal for a Chinese company ever, and came in the same month that two other frontier labs raised blockbuster Series A rounds totaling at or close to $1 billion.

The bulk of October’s venture funding was invested in the two leading countries for startup investment, with companies based in the U.S. and China raising $28 billion and $20.6 billion last month, respectively. The last time more than $20 billion was invested in China in a single month was June 2018, when Ant Group raised $14 billion in its Series C funding. Funding concentration Funding concentrated in seven companies that raised billion-dollar rounds, accounting for just over 40% of October’s venture funding. These large amounts were invested in frontier labs, manufacturing, energy, semiconductors, prediction markets and spend management software. Private equity led much of this funding, along with a few multistage venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures and Lux Capital. DeepSeek’s $15.9 billion raise at a valuation of $90 billion marked the largest private funding by a Chinese tech company on record. The deal places DeepSeek among the Top 10 most highly funded private companies. It also makes it the second most highly valued Chinese company after ByteDance, and the third most highly valued private frontier lab after U.S. companies Anthropic and OpenAI. DeepSeek wasn’t the only Chinese frontier lab to raise big in October. Moonshot AI, a rival open-source lab, reportedly reached a $50 billion value in October, making it the 11th most valuable private company on The Crunchbase Unicorn Board. The startup has also reportedly confidentially filed to go public on the Hong Kong stock exchange. Massachusetts-based manufacturing startup Re:Build raised the second-largest funding deal last month, a $2.1 billion round. The company partners with industrial companies and innovators from the product design phase to large-scale production and says it has 2.4 million square feet of manufacturing capacity.