nearly 20 percent gain in dollars, but a 28 percent slide in deals compared with the same quarter last year, when $225 million was invested in 32 companies throughout the San Diego area.
Quarterly venture activity in San Diego tends to be erratic, however. Over the past decade, the MoneyTree Report shows that the $419.5 million was invested in San Diego during the fourth quarter of 2007 fell to $185.1 million in the same quarter a year later—and swung back to $341 million in 2009.
Here’s our list of San Diego’s top 10 venture deals during the fourth quarter, based on the MoneyTree data:
Razer USA $50 million
AnaptysBio $33.9M
Elevation Pharmaceuticals $30M
Rempex Pharmaceuticals $25M
Legend 3D $19M
Anaphore $15M
SG Biofuels $15M
BeneChill $14M
CoDa Therapeutics $14M
Ophthonix $14M
The MoneyTree list of venture deals did not include the $85 million that San Diego-based DriveCam raised in November. It ranks as the biggest deal in San Diego during the last three months of 2011, and it’s unclear why it wasn’t included. DriveCam described it at the time as a private equity investment.
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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