VC Slows, ViaSat Soars, Wests Unveil $100M Healthtech Fund, & More San Diego BizTech News

Data on venture capital investment activity during the third quarter poured in from different sources last week. The highlights are here, along with the rest of the San Diego’s biztech news.

—Total venture capital invested in San Diego startups so far this year amounted to $567.7 million in 82 deals, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, National Venture Capital Association, and Thomson Reuters. That’s down about 13 percent from the first nine months of 2010, when $652.5 million went into 95 deals. A rival survey from Dow Jones VentureSource counted year-to-date investments of $556.7 million in 66 venture deals in San Diego—down about 7 percent from the $599.8 million invested in 65 deals during the same period last year.

—Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VSAT]]) seems to have succeeded in its $1 billion-plus gamble to put a satellite into orbit over North America. ViaSat-1 has more total bandwidth capacity than any previous commercial communication satellite. The satellite, intended to provide high-speed Internet service in sparsely populated areas, was launched from the Baikonour Cosmodrome in Kazalstan.

—San Diego philanthropists Gary and Mary West, who made their fortune in telemarketing, have created a new $100 million investment fund to provide early stage funding for startups developing technology that promises to drive down the cost of healthcare. The new West Health Investment Fund, which is affiliated with San Diego’s West Wireless Health Institute, already has invested in six startups.

—The IPO Task Force, an independent group formed to address the dramatic reduction in venture-backed IPOs over the past decade, called for lawmakers and regulators to relax some of the rules that have made an IPO a risky and expensive hassle. The task force, headed by Kate Mitchell of Scale Venture Partners, said it doesn’t want to overturn regulations intended to protect investors. Rather, the IPO Task Force argues for taking “reasonable and measured steps” to ease certain regulations.

—JMI Equity, the private equity fund based in San Diego and Baltimore, MD, said it led a $54 million investment round in CouponCabin, a Web-based company based in Whiting, IN, that offers discounts on merchandise from Dell, RadioShack, Target.com, Best Buy and others. Paul Barber, JMI’s managing general partner in San Diego, told me Baltimore partner Brad Woloson handled the deal.

—AOL, the New York online media company once known as America Online, re-launched its Internet radio service under a partnership with San Diego’s Slacker. “Unlike other providers, AOL Radio powered by Slacker offers free mobile service, professionally curated content, and sports and news content,” AOL said in a press release last week.

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.