Venture Goes Mobile as 3rd Quarter Deal Activity Hits 12-Year High

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that venture firms invested a total of nearly $1.17 billion in 110 healthcare deals, which was a 27 percent decline in deals and 36 percent drop in funding from the prior quarter, when VCs invested $1.56 billion in 151 deals.

Cleantech venture funding also continued its downward slide, and CB Insights reports that just $321 million invested across 33 deals.

Silicon Valley continued to reign over other regions in both CB Insights’ financing and exit stats. The valley widened its lead over Southern California in terms of both VC deals and dollars, claiming eight out of 10 deals and more than 80 percent of the funding invested in the Golden State.

New York ranked as the second most-active region in the CB Insights report, with VCs investing $670 million in 102 deals. That accounted for 9 percent of the funding and 12 percent of the venture deals nationwide. Roughly two-thirds of the deals and 78 percent of the funding went to Internet-related ventures in New York.

Venture firms invested $609 million in 80 deals throughout Massachusetts, which amounted to 9 percent of total U.S. deals and 8 percent of the dollars. About 46 percent of the venture funding in the Bay State went to healthcare startups. Nearly one-third of the deals were seed-stage.

Washington state saw another volatile quarter of VC investment activity, with funding plunging to $105 million (from $208 million in the previous quarter and from $132 million in the year-ago quarter). The deal count was steadier. CB Insights counted 26 deals during the quarter, down from 27 in the prior quarter but higher than the 24 deals in the year-ago quarter. Venture investments in mobile and telecom took 60 percent of the funding, inflated by the $50 million Kymeta deal.

In Texas, venture firms invested $177 million (2 percent of the national total) in 32 deals (4 percent of the total), with most of the deals and dollars focused on Internet investments in Austin. Venture investments in energy-related startups amounted to 6 percent of the deals and 12 percent of the dollars invested in Texas.

Colorado had almost $145 million in 25 deals, and Michigan saw more than $22.6 million in six deals. A full accounting of venture deals in 38 states and the District of Columbia is in the CB Insights chart below.
Q3 VC activity by state

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.