Our friends at CB Insights made an early break out of the gate again today with data on venture capital investments in private companies, this time reporting total VC funding of $5.4 billion in 715 deals nationwide for the third quarter that ended Sept. 30.
The CB Insights Venture Capital Activity Report shows, though, that venture investing continues to seesaw, with mixed results in many sectors. The New York information services company notes that the $5.4 billion total for the quarter is the lowest U.S. funding level since mid-2009. On the other hand, the CB report says the 715 deals is the second-highest tally over the past two years—July was particularly strong with 298 deals—and “would suggest optimism given the quarter’s dealflow strength.”
CB Insights also charted a re-emergence of seed-stage deals, from 1 percent of the deals in the third quarter of 2009 to 11 percent of total deals across a variety of sectors in the same quarter this year. CB says that also indicates “a healthy early-stage investment environment.” In short, CB’s numbers show that VCs throughout the country are funding a larger number of smaller deals.
Healthcare was the single largest sector for dollars invested, as usual, with more than $1.75 billion invested in 184 deals nationwide during the three months that ended September 30. Yet it declined from the same quarter of 2009, when venture firms put
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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.
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