Avalon Still Raising Capital After Landing $161M for Ninth Fund

Avalon Ventures, the San Diego-based venture capital firm founded by Kevin Kinsella, has surpassed its targeted minimum fund-raising goal for its ninth venture fund. After closing on a significant investment in the fund yesterday, Avalon Ventures IX now stands at $161 million, according to Kinsella.

These days, it is practically headline news when a San Diego-based venture firm raises a new fund. While the lights are still on at many local venture firms, the partners must be getting their deliveries from Meals on Wheels, because they’re not getting out much.

Avalon, in contrast, has continued to actively invest in new startups, in both life sciences and technology, after closing its eighth fund at $150 million in early 2008. The firm made about two dozen investments over the past two years.

Avalon’s Kinsella, who was a solo practitioner when he raised his first small fund here in 1983, wanted to attract between $150 million and $200 million for Avalon IX when the firm began raising capital in May. With funding now at $161 million, Kinsella says the firm is well past its minimum target of $150 million—“but we still have another large close to go with a couple of existing LPs in a month or two.”

Avalon focuses on early stage investments, which the firm’s four partners tend to identify and develop on their own. Kinsella and partner Jay Lichter manage the life sciences deals, which include recent investments in Avelas Biosciences, aFraxis, Otonomy, and Zacharon Pharmaceuticals. Partners Steve Tomlin and Rich Levandov, who works in Boston, oversee the firm’s investments in wireless communications and Web media applications, which include Zynga, Chumby Industries, E-Band Communications, Cloudkick, and Nabbr.

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.