San Diego Startups Raise Over $300M From VCs in Second Quarter

cash, folding money,

[Corrected 7/20/12, 10:55 am. See below.] It wasn’t the best of times for venture capital activity in San Diego. But it wasn’t the worst of times, either.

Venture capital firms invested $304.8 million in 27 startups during the three months that ended June 30, according to regional data released as part of the MoneyTree Report on nationwide VC activity. PricewaterhouseCoopers prepares the report with help from the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters. (A list of the quarter’s top 10 deals is below.)

The amount of capital invested during the second quarter represented a 20 percent increase over the second quarter of 2011, when VCs invested $253 million in startups throughout San Diego County. But it was a 17 percent decline from the previous quarter, when VCs put $369.2 million into local startups.

In comparison with the previous quarter, the 27 deals completed during the second quarter was better than the first quarter, when venture firms invested in just 25 local startups. But it was down from the 33 deals counted during the second quarter of 2011.

More than half of the 27 deals (15) involved life sciences startups (biotechnology and medical devices and equipment. The next largest category was software, with five companies raising venture capital, according to the report.

San Diego ranked fifth in comparison with venture investing in other regions during the quarter. The breakdown:

San Franscisco Bay Area: $3.2 billion in 226 companies

New England: $843.2 million in

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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.