General Catalyst Leads Most US Start-Up Rounds in October, With $5.1 Billion in Lead Deals

The rounds General Catalyst led or co-led were collectively valued at $5.1 billion. Two deals account for most of that: a $2.1 billion round for Re:Build, which works with manufacturers on product design and production, and a $2 billion Series A for Axiom Solutions International, a cloud and power infrastructure business spun out of manufacturing services provider Flex.

The tally matters for founders and limited partners because it shows where the largest US firms are concentrating capital after a week in which public AI stocks have sold off sharply. October's data, which predates that sell-off, points to venture investors still writing large cheques, much of it for the physical infrastructure behind AI, such as power and data centre capacity.

By number of lead deals, Lightspeed Venture Partners ranked second with eight, followed by Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz with seven each. Accel also placed high across several of the rankings, Crunchbase said.

On the value measure, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which co-led the Re:Build round, ranked as the second-biggest spender, followed by Koch Equity, which co-led the Axiom deal. Next came the five co-lead investors in Ramp's Series G. Crunchbase gives that fintech round as $1.9 billion in its investor rankings and $1.85 billion in its separate monthly funding tally.

When all participation is counted, not only lead positions, Y Combinator was again the busiest investor in rounds of $5 million or more, reflecting the accelerator's habit of joining follow-on rounds for companies that went through its programme. Andreessen Horowitz took part in at least 22 such rounds and General Catalyst in 17.

Crunchbase's global figures put October venture funding at $59 billion, up 45% from a year earlier. Companies working on AI took 66% of that money. US-based start-ups raised $28 billion, while Chinese companies raised $20.6 billion, the most in a single month since June 2018, lifted by a $15.9 billion round for DeepSeek at a $90 billion valuation.

Funding was heavily concentrated. Seven companies that raised rounds of $1 billion or more took just over 40% of the month's total, Crunchbase said. Besides DeepSeek, Re:Build, Axiom and Ramp, they were chipmaker Tenstorrent with a $1.5 billion Series E, prediction market Kalshi with a $1 billion Series E and Flapping Airplanes with a $1 billion Series A. Private equity firms led much of that billion-dollar funding, with multistage venture firms including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures and Lux Capital also taking part.

No October round came close to the record financings for OpenAI and Anthropic earlier in the year, Crunchbase noted. The November figures will be the first to show whether the AI stock rout since the US midterm elections has carried over into private funding.