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Startup Funding Heats Up In October, With Billion-Dollar Rounds To Reflection, Polymarket, Crusoe And Base Power

4 November 2025 at 16:00

Nine startups each raised $500 million or more last month, making October the second-busiest month in the past two years for such enormous funding deals. The busiest? That title goes to September, highlighting the extent to which startup investment deals of a half-trillion or more have become normalized in just the past few months.

All told, venture investors poured $39 billion globally into early- and late-stage startups in October, Crunchbase data shows. Funding was up from $34 billion a year ago, though down from $51 billion month over month.

In a rare occurrence, startups outside of Silicon Valley led the largest funding deals last month, Crunchbase data shows.

Funding to New York-based startups surged by more than 200% from a year ago. The largest two venture rounds last month of $2 billion each went to New York-based companies: coding agent Reflection.ai, in an Nvidia-backed round, and trading prediction market Polymarket, in a deal led by NYSE parent Intercontinental Exchange.

Other large rounds were also raised by companies outside of Silicon Valley. Denver-based AI data center Crusoe Energy Systems raised the third-largest round, a $1.4 billion deal led by Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners. Austin-based battery energy provider Base Power raised $1 billion led by private equity firm Addition, and Finland-based health and wellness ring tracker Oura raised a $900 million round led by Fidelity.

In September by contrast, the largest rounds were raised by foundation model companies Anthropic ($13 billion), Mistral AI ($2 billion) and AI chip company Cerebras Systems ($1.1 billion).

China and India were up

The U.S. continued to dominate and led with 60% of global funding.

China, the second-largest funding market, gained more than 200% year over year in October with $3.9 billion invested into its startups. The U.K., the third-largest market, was flat year over year at $1.7 billion. India rounded out the top four markets with $1.5 billion raised — up 80% from a year earlier.

In the U.S., California-based companies raised $8.5 billion in October, while startups in New York state raised $5.9 billion, and Massachusetts-based companies landed $1.9 billion last month.

Crypto, energy increased

AI again dominated startup funding last month, with 38% of investment going to the sector, up 9% year over year but down from September totals.

Healthcare and biotech was the second-largest sector with $8.6 billion. The third-largest sector, financial services companies, raised $7.6 billion.

Industries that trended up significantly year over year were blockchain and crypto, energy, and funding to developer tools.

Valuations heat up

The Crunchbase Unicorn Board added hundreds of billions in value in October as OpenAI sold employee shares in a secondary sale valuing the company at $500 billion. An uptick in newly valued decacorn companies seen in September, continued into October, albeit at a slower pace.

The IPO markets have opened up since Q2. However, the largest tech IPO in October, travel expense management company Navan, closed at $20, down 20%, on its first day of trading in contrast to many of the larger tech IPOs this year that closed well above the list price on going public.

Methodology

The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Data reported is as of Nov. 3, 2025.

Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Glossary of funding terms

Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less.

Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million.

Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round.

Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.)

In The Space Of Months, AI Funding Boom Adds More Than $500B In Value To Unicorn Board And Reshuffles Top 20

Crunchbase News

By:Gené Teare

3 November 2025 at 16:00

The Crunchbase Unicorn Board crested $6 trillion in total value for the first time in August 2025. It only took around 18 months to get there after hitting the $5 trillion mark.

Within a few months of the August milestone, the board added another half-trillion-plus in value, an unprecedented increase, even when compared to the peak market of 2021 and early 2022. The rapid acceleration in unicorn values highlights the remarkable pace at which the AI sector is driving up revenue — and, in turn, valuations.

Much of the valuation surge on the board — which lists private companies valued at $1 billion or more — was driven by frontier model companies adding hundreds of billions in value, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows.

Notably, there was also an uptick in companies that reached decacorn valuations for the first time and notched significant jumps in value over their previous marks.

Reshuffling of the top 20

These valuation hikes were most noticeable in the 20 most highly valued companies on the Unicorn Board, which has undergone a major reshuffling at the top.

OpenAI added $200 billion in the space of six months in early October after adding $143 billion in the prior six months. With a $500 billion valuation, the San Francisco-based startup is now the most highly valued company on the board, after it leapfrogged SpaceX for the No. 1 spot.

SpaceX itself added $50 billion to its value in September, taking the Hawthorne, California-based company’s valuation to $400 billion.

Anthropic, the fourth most highly valued unicorn after SpaceX and ByteDance, added $121.5 billion in value in the space of six months, valuing the San Francisco-based company at $183 billion as of September.

Meanwhile, Databricks, another San Francisco-based company, added $38 billion in value within nine months, placing the company sixth on the board with a valuation of $100 billion. That ranks it just below China’s Ant Group, which was valued at $150 billion in 2018.

Sydney-based design software maker Canva added $10 billion in value in August in an employee share sale led by Fidelity that valued the company at $42 billion.

New decacorns

Eleven companies have already joined the decacorn club in H2 so far — outpacing the half-year counts we’ve seen since H2 2022.

Of the 11 new decacorns, the company that increased its value by the largest percentage was humanoid robotics company Figure. The San Jose, California-based startup catapulted into the top 20 with a $1 billion funding at a post money valuation of $39 billion. That was up from its March 2024 valuation of $2.7 billion — marking a more than 1,300% increase in 18 months. The funding was led by New York-based Parkway Venture Capital, which also led Figure’s Series A funding in 2023. The company is building out humanoid robots for home and commercial work, and is investing in manufacturing and training its own AI model.

Another unicorn that posted a big valuation surge is cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, which raised $500 million at a $15 billion valuation in September. The San Francisco-based company was last valued in 2019 at $4 billion.

Many of these newly minted decacorns’ ratcheted up by more than $5 billion in less than a year. Along with Figure and Kraken, the following are other new decacorns that have emerged just since the start of the second half of 2025:

France-based frontier model company Mistral was valued at $13.2 billion in a funding led by Netherlands-based chipmaker ASML.
San Francisco-based livestream shopping platform Whatnot raised $225 million at $11.5 billion value led by CapitalG and DST Global. Whatnot was last valued at $5 billion in January.
Ring health tracker Oura based in Finland raised $900 million at an $11 billion valuation led by Fidelity.
New York-based Bilt Rewards, a commerce network for renters, raised $250 million at a $10.8 billion value led by General Catalyst and GID.
Colorado-based quantum computing company Quantinuum, part of Honeywell, raised $600 million at a $10.6 billion valuation led by NVentures.
Palo Alto AI lab Cognition, focused on reasoning and code, raised $400 million at a $10.2 billion value led by Founders Fund. Cognition, last valued at $4 billion in March, acquired Windsurf in July.
San Francisco-based Mercor connects human expertise for AI lab training. Mercor raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation led by Felicis 1. Felicis also led its prior funding in February at a $2 billion valuation.
Colorado-based Crusoe Energy Systems, which is building AI datacenters, raised $1.4 billion at a $10 billion valuation led by Mubadala Capital and Valor Equity Partners.
San Francisco-based conversational customer experience AI startup Sierra raised $350 million at a $10 billion valuation led by Greenoaks.

In Q2, five companies joined the $10 billion-plus club. They include Applied Intuition, Helsing, Perplexity, Thinking Machines Lab and Safe Super Intelligence. (Perplexity has since raised multiple rounds to reach a value of $20 billion.)

Markets heat up

While the frontier AI labs are seeing the largest valuation increases, there are a greater number of companies this year joining the decacorn club, second only to counts seen in 2021. We find 82 private companies in the decacorn club as of October 2025 with more than a third that raised funding in 2025 to date. This pick-up in higher counts of new decacorns could be an indicator that the IPO markets warm up in 2026.