[Corrected 4/18/14, 7:40 am See below.] Venture capital firms invested $243 million in 23 deals in the San Diego area during the first quarter that ended in March, according to data from the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association, and Thomson Reuters.
It was a strong upturn in the amount of capital invested, representing a 67 percent increase over the $145.5 million that VCs invested in San Diego startups during the previous quarter, and a 20 percent rise over the $203 million invested during the first quarter of 2013, according to MoneyTree Data.
The deal count remained more or less comparable. There were 24 deals in the previous quarter, and 27 in the same quarter of 2013.
[Corrected total for life sciences] About $178 million—or 73 percent of the total invested in the region during the quarter—went into 13 life sciences companies.
In the single biggest deal of the quarter, San Diego’s Lumena Pharmaceuticals raised $45.5 million from Alta Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Pappas Ventures, RA Capital Management, RiverVest Venture Partners, and Adage Capital Management. The three-year-old company, founded to develop new oral drugs for treating a rare group of metabolic disorders and liver diseases, recently filed for an IPO.
A new San Diego startup called Human Longevity Inc. (HLI) made the list, but without much information. HLI is a genetic services startup founded by the genetic entrepreneur J. Craig Venter, former Celgene executive Robert Hariri, and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation. Venter told reporters in early March that HLI had raised $70 million in a funding round led by