Photo: Getty Images. Illustration: Inc. Magazine It's been a head-scratchingly prolific year for the flow of money in Silicon Valley and the grander startup ecosystem. With many IPOs hitting their targets despite a global pandemic--or perhaps with help from it--it's no surprise that companies have continued to pursue the exit strategy of acquisition. Deal flow was down slightly from 2019, and certainly from 2018--but still, some very notable mergers and acquisitions weren't hindered by the economic uncertainty brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Some of the biggest deals took place between companies that were already public--such as Salesforce's $27.7 billion mega-acquisition of Slack, which had gone public in 2019. Uber seemed keen to buy already-public Grubhub--but then in July, European take-out giant Just Eat Takeaway swooped in, acquiring it for $7.3 billion and creating the largest food-delivery company outside of China. Then there was the biggest deal of the decade, in which SoftBank agreed to sell its U.K.-based chipmaker, Arm Software, to Nvidia in a $40 billion deal in September.