San Diego’s Q1 Venture Activity Surges on One Mega Deal

Boosted by a $144-million “mega deal” that Sappire Energy disclosed a few weeks ago, VC investments in San Diego climbed to a four-year high during the first quarter of 2012, according to a pair of VC surveys being released today.

San Diego’s bouyant trend, however, ran counter to a significant downward trend in overall VC funding throughout the United States, according to the surveys. We saw a similar nationwide decline in dollars invested during the first quarter in the venture capital activity report released earlier this week by CB Insights, the New York financial data services firm. (CB Insights does not break out its data by region, however.)

In the MoneyTree Report, VC investors provided almost $357.1 million in 22 deals throughout San Diego County. Almost half of the capital—$175 million—went into 12 life sciences deals here. Total funding amounted to the biggest slug of venture dollars for San Diego companies since the second quarter of 2008, when VCs invested $362.1 million in 39 deals, according to the MoneyTree survey, which is prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data from Thomson Reuters.

The numbers vary in the first-quarter data from Dow Jones VentureSource, but a similar surge of venture financing is apparent in the first-quarter data for San Diego. The financial services arm says VCs invested $467.25 million in 21 deals throughout San Diego County. It’s the most capital invested in this area that Dow Jones has counted in more than four years.

The national trend is a different story, however.

The MoneyTree Report found that VCs invested $5.8 billion in 758 deals in the first quarter, which represented a

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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.