Earlier this week, my colleague Bruce took a look at venture capital activity across the country in the first quarter of 2010, and found that investors were sinking more cash into startups than they did a year ago.
We track these deals with data provided by private company intelligence platform CB Insights, Dow Jones VentureSource, and MoneyTree, a report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association using data from Thomson Reuters. Each has their own way of tracking venture dollars and defining deals, so the figures for first quarter venture investing ranged from $4.7 billion to $5.9 billion.
But we also like to provide a closer look by highlighting the top 10 deals for each of the regions we cover, which offers a sense of the trends in the size of individual transactions, the sectors that have gotten the most cash, and the companies that are growing in prominence. The list I have here for the top 10 deals from January to March is drawn mainly from the MoneyTree data, and checked against our Xconomy archives, as well as the Dow Jones and CB Insights numbers.
The highest deal came in at $36 million to TransMedics (we originally reported the deal at $35.4 million based on an SEC filing, but the company later announced it as a $36 million round). The Andover, MA-based company develops systems for transporting organs for transplant. The next three transactions followed closely at TransMedics’ heels, each with $35 million. All four top spots went to life sciences companies (as did another three on the top 10 deals list from Q1 2010).
It’s no surprise to me that seven of the top 10 deals in the first month of this year went to life sciences firms. We track venture investing dollars monthly, thanks to data provided to us by CB Insights, and the sector was the leader in venture dollars in February and March, and a close runner-up in January.
But that doesn’t mean other sectors are necessarily flagging. Energy had a pretty strong showing on the top 10 deals list, with
