sputter as the third-largest sector, with $763 million invested in 56 deals. The CB Insights data shows that it was a 40 percent drop from the $1.28 billion invested in green and cleantech deals during the previous quarter, and a nearly 19 percent decline from the 69 deals. Comparing the first quarter to the same quarter in 2011 shows even more of a freefall, though, with a 60 percent plunge from the $1.9 billion in venture funding and a nearly 35 drop from the 86 deals. “It’s the drop in deal activity that is probably most worth tracking,” CB Insights says.
The biggest green and cleantech deals were:
SolarCity (Foster City, CA)
Joule Unlimited (Bedford, MA)
LanzaTech (Roselle, IL)
MiaSole (Santa Clara, CA)
Renmatix (King of Prussia, PA)
For the first time, CB Insights broke out data for a new sector—mobile and telecom—showing that venture firms invested $435 million in 93 deals. In the previous quarter, VCs provided $756 million in funding to 92 companies. “Like most tech investment sectors, VCs are favoring small seed investments in the mobile sector,” CB Insights says.
Boku (San Francisco, CA)
Ruckus Wireless (Sunnyvale, CA)
Jasper Wireless (Sunnyvale, CA)
Ooma (Palo Alto, CA)
Verivo Software (Waltham, MA)
In the regional breakdown, Washington State was the outlier and staged something of a comeback, with $206 million invested in 28 companies. While that represents just 4 percent of all deals nationwide and just 5 percent of the capital VCs deployed during
Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4
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.
View all posts by Bruce V. Bigelow
