preceding quarter, when VCs put $218 million into 27 companies, according to the MoneyTree data. Over time, the numbers also reflect a gradual decline of deployed venture capital and deals in this area.
So what’s going on?
“It’s a good question,” says Ivor Royston of San Diego-based Forward Ventures. “There’s obviously a contraction going on. There is so much activity now in consumer Internet and social media, and most of that activity takes place in the Bay Area and back East.”
Royston also sees a broader contraction among venture investors in the life sciences, where he specializes. “There’s less capital available, and people are being very careful,” Royston says. “I do think the innovation is still here to be done.”
David Titus, who was recently hired to serve as the first official president of the San Diego Venture Group, says the statistics for a single quarter tend to be misleading because long-term trends are often obscured by the lumpiness of quarterly results. “So much of our dollar totals here can get swung by two or three late-stage biotech deals,” Titus says. Perhaps others will offer their perspectives below.
The top 10 San Diego deals, according to the MoneyTree Report:
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Conatus Pharmaceuticals $25.3M
Genomatica, $23.8M
ecoATM, $14.4M
Elcelyx Therapeutics, $6.1M
Mpex Pharmaceuticals, $5.1M
Ophthonix, $4.7M
Verdezyne, $3.1M
Next Therapeutics, $3M
Grid2Home, $2.6M
Axikin Pharmaceuticals, $2.5M
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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.
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