San Diego Venture Funding at Odds with U.S. Trend; Our Top 10 Deals

Venture funding in San Diego has been running counter to the downward drift we’ve been seeing nationwide, and third-quarter VC activity was no exception, according to regional data released today as part of the MoneyTree Report.

Venture activity has been so strong in San Diego, in fact, that the $957.7 million that venture firms invested here through the first nine months of 2012 already exceeds the $926.6 million that VCs invested in San Diego for the entire year in 2011. The breakout of MoneyTree data came from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

In contrast, venture funding nationwide has been lagging behind the pace set in 2011. As I’ve reported elsewhere this morning, the experts are predicting the level of VC investments in 2012 will fall short of the $29.4 billion the MoneyTree survey tallied in 2011.

In San Diego, the MoneyTree survey shows that venture investors put $241.5 million in 20 companies during the third quarter that ended June 30. That’s an 11 percent increase over the $217.8 million that VCs invested in 24 deals during the same quarter last year. It’s down about 25 percent, though, from the $320.6 million that VCs invested in 29 San Diego startups during the previous quarter.

Here are San Diego’s top 10 deals:

Aragon Pharmaceuticals, $50.1 million; Aisling Capital, Column Group, OrbiMed Advisors, Topspin Partners, venBio.

Tandem Diabetes Care, $35.2 million; Delphi Ventures, Domain Associates, HLM Venture Partners, TPG Growth, undisclosed investor.

Genomatica, $34.5 million; Alloy Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Mohr Davidow Ventures, TPG Growth, VantagePoint Capital Partners, two undisclosed investors.

Fallbrook Technologies, $20.2 million; NGEN Partners, Robeco Private Equity, SAM Group Holding, undisclosed investor.

CoDa Therapeutics, $19.4 million; RusNano MedInvest, Domain Associates, GBS Ventures, BioPacificVentures.

Vital Therapies, $16 million; Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Landmark Partners, MedVenture Associates, Valley Ventures, Versant Ventures.

Cebix, $12.9 million; InterWest Partners, Sofinnova Ventures, Thomas, McNerney & Partners.

Tealium, $10.5 million; Battery Ventures.

UpWind Solutions, $10 million; Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, undisclosed investor.

PTI Marketing Technologies, $7 million; undisclosed investor.

 

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.