Mega Deals (Like Uber) Boost Venture Funding to $13B

Venture capital investors pumped almost $13 billion into 1,114 U.S. startups in the second quarter—marking the highest level of VC funding in 13 years, according to the MoneyTree Report being released today.

While the number of deals is comparable with recent quarters, the $12.97 billion VCs deployed this spring was a third more than the $9.7 billion VCs invested during the first quarter, and 81 percent higher than the $7.2 billion invested during the same quarter of last year, according to MoneyTree data. PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) prepare the MoneyTree Report, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

(Our list of MoneyTree’s Top 10 Deals is below.)

The latest findings confirm a quick snapshot on VC activity that came out last week from CB Insights, showing that second-quarter venture funding totaled almost $13.9 billion. Another source of data on VC activity, Dow Jones VentureSource, reported yesterday that over $13.8 billion was invested nationwide over the three months that ended June 30.

The absolute numbers vary because each survey uses different sources and ways of measuring venture dollars and deals. For example, the MoneyTree Report did not include a $450 million round in San Francisco-based Airbnb, which was widely reported in April and was included by CB Insights and Dow Jones VentureSource. (A MoneyTree spokeswoman said the Airbnb would likely be included in third-quarter data because the deal won’t actually be funded until July.)

Nevertheless, all three VC surveys agree that venture investments levels this spring were the highest since the dot-com era, and 2014 is already shaping up to be a spectacular year for the VC industry.

Comparisons to the dot-com bubble might seem inevitable, but a couple of factors are distorting the picture, according to

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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.