Early View of Second Quarter Shows VC Investing Activity at $5.3B, Up 61 Percent

We got an early peek at second-quarter VC investing today from ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information service (and new Xconomy partner) that uses a “structured wiki” to collect data on startups, and monitors venture capital investments nationwide.

ChubbyBrain says venture activity bounced back, with more than $5.3 billion invested during the three months that ended in June. That’s up nearly 61 percent over the first quarter of 2009, when ChubbyBrain shows VC firms invested $3.3 billion nationwide. The strong rebound pretty much dispels speculation that investment levels would inch up slowly, according to ChubbyBrain co-founder Anand Sanwal

ChubbyBrain says the number of deals totaled 613 during the quarter, but it’s not possible to compare to its data for the same quarter in 2008, since it’s just starting out. Think of it as an exit poll until we get more detailed results early next week as the National Venture Capital Association and Dow Jones VentureSource release their data. In the meantime, ChubbyBrain provides some other insights:

—Healthcare was the biggest sector getting venture investments during the three months that ended in June, garnering 37 percent of VC dollars nationwide. Investments in Internet startups, which got 14 percent of the total, represented the next-biggest category, while energy-related startups got 10 percent.

—Most of the money, as usual, was invested in California. Almost 43 percent of the $5.3 billion was invested in the Golden State. Massachusetts got 9 percent of the dollars and about 8 percent went to Washington state. (ChubbyBrain breaks out its results by state, but not regional or metropolitan areas.)

—It has been widely reported that many venture capital firms are performing financial triage on their porfolio companies, so many expected VC funding for seed and early stage startups would suffer. But ChubbyBrain reports “healthy levels of early stage investment in Seed and Series A rounds, accounting for 35 percent of the total number of deals.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.