San Diego Venture Funding Drops in QI—But Here are Top 10 Deals

The pace of venture capital funding slowed substantially in San Diego during the first quarter, with venture firms investing $253.5 million in 21 startups, according to data from the MoneyTree Report.

The amount of capital invested in San Diego was down by almost a third from the same quarter in 2015, when VCs provided over $373 million to 23 startup companies, according to MoneyTree data.

First-quarter venture activity also was down by 28 percent in comparison with the prior quarter, when VCs invested over $352 million in 26 deals.

The MoneyTree Report is prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), based on data from Thomson Reuters.

Acutus Medical, a Carlsbad, CA-medical device company, closed the quarter’s single biggest deal in the region in late March—raising $75 million to advance its technology for diagnosing and treating irregular heartbeats. Nine of the 21 deals in San Diego involved biotech or medical equipment companies.

The top 10 San Diego deals, based on MoneyTree data, are:

Acutus Medical $75 million Heart rhythm technology company.
Zavante Therapeutics $45.7 million Biopharmaceutical.
Figtree $30 million Clean energy financing
Bio Theranostics $20 million Medical diagnostics and equipment.
Source 44 $17.5 million Software used in supply chain management
Effector Therapeutics $16 million Biopharmaceutical
Mindtouch $12 million Software used to manage training manuals and other “help content.”
Thesan Pharmaceuticals $9.5 million Biopharmaceutical
Amplyx Pharmaceuticals $8.7 million Anti-fungal drug development
Bird Rock Bio $5 million Biologic drug development

 

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.