Q4 Venture Deals, Dollars Stayed Strong, Making 2011 Best in a Decade

multi-quarter deal flow slide and also came down on funding.” During the same quarter last year, VCs put $119 million into 28 deals in the Evergreen state.

In their sector analysis, CB Insights says venture investments in healthcare-related startups rebounded during the quarter, but not dramatically. The $1.895 billion that VCs deployed during the quarter was marginally better than the $1.894 billion counted during the second quarter of 2011.

The number of fourth-quarter deals—172—was a high for 2011, but comparable to the 173 healthcare deals that CB Insights counted in the same quarter of 2010. After three quarters of declining deal volume, though, it was an overall improvement.

CB Insights says the biggest healthcare deals of the quarter were:

Portola Pharmaceuticals (San Francisco)

Agios Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, MA)

Rempex Pharmaceuticals (San Diego)

Sensors for Medicine & Science (Germantown, MD)

Dermira (Redwood City, CA)

Cleave Biosciences (Burlingame, CA)

Internet startups got the most love from VCs, with the $2.5 billion invested during the fourth quarter accounting for a third of the capital deployed nationwide and the 283 deals representing 37 percent of the total number of deals. Those numbers were in line with the same quarter last year but down from the previous quarter.

The biggest Internet deals were:

Dropbox (San Francisco)

LivingSocial (Washington DC)

WhaleShark Media (Austin, TX)

Box.net (Palo Alto, CA)

Venture funding for green and cleantech companies remained modest, with nearly $1.3 billion invested in 69 deals nationwide. Companies developing renewable energy technologies accounted for the sector’s biggest share (almost a third of the deals, and nearly half of the dollars). Energy storage companies got the second-largest share of funding (6 percent) and energy efficiency companies accounted for the next highest number of deals (12 percent).

Better Place (Palo Alto, CA)

Stion (San Jose, CA)

Soraa (Fremont, CA)

eRecyclingCorps (Irving, TX)

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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.