San Diego’s Avalon Ventures Closes Ninth Fund, Raises $200 M

When Avalon Ventures began fund-raising for its ninth venture fund back in May, the San Diego VC firm said it was targeting $150 million. Today Avalon plans to announce that it has closed capital commitments of $200 million for its ninth and largest fund.

Founder Kevin Kinsella says Avalon Ventures IX was more than 33 percent oversubscribed, and all of the institutional investors in Avalon’s two previous funds returned to make commitments to the newest fund. “We’re pretty happy with that,” he told me by phone.

Kinsella, who founded Avalon in San Diego in 1983, says the firm will continue to invest in early stage companies in two general areas, life sciences and digital media, primarily along the West Coast (San Diego, the Bay Area, and Seattle) and the Northeast Corridor. Avalon also added two partners for its latest fund. At its office in La Jolla, Avalon CFO Doug Downs is joining Kinsella, Stephen Tomlin, and Jay Lichter as a general partner. In Cambridge, MA, Brady Bohrmann, who was a venture partner in Avalon’s eighth fund, is joining Rich Levandov as a general partner.

Kinsella initially had expected that Avalon would close its latest fund in a few weeks. Instead it took more than six months, as the firm got a stronger-than-expected response. But Avalon already has made six investments out of its newest fund. So far, they are:

—Aratana Therapeutics, a newly formed company in suburban Kansas City with several late stage development programs to treat common maladies of domestic dogs and cats. Aratana said Friday that it closed on $20 million in Series A funding led

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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.