Venture firms invested $6.48 billion in 890 deals throughout the United States during the three months that ended September 30, according to the MoneyTree Report being released today by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Venture activity remained strong during the third quarter in the software sector, but funding for life sciences and cleantech startups continued to lag, according to the report, which is put together from data provided by Thomson Reuters.
“The headline is that dollars are down and deal volume also is down,” says Jon Callaghan, who oversees software and technology investments at San Francisco-based True Ventures. “But if you get into it a little deeper, the numbers are still really strong.”
A handful of colossal deals helped do the heavy lifting. San Francisco-based Square alone raised $200 million from venture investors during the quarter, and there were four other $100 million-plus deals pitching in. (A deals list is below.)
Mobile computing, in particular, is remaking the infrastructure of the Web, Callaghan told me in a phone interview yesterday. “There’s a lot to be excited about,” Callaghan says. “One of the over-arching themes of this era of venture investing is capital efficiency. Entrepreneurs can build an awful lot of product for very little money.”
According to the MoneyTree Report, the almost $6.5 billion that VCs invested during the third quarter was down 11 percent from the same quarter in 2011, when over $7.3 billion was
