Money pumped into San Diego’s regional economy by venture capital firms hit an eight-year low in 2011, with a total of $829 million invested in 104 startups throughout the year, according to the MoneyTree VC survey being released today. The 2011 deal count was the lowest seen in San Diego since 1997.
The 2011 numbers represent a 5 percent decline in dollars and a 17 percent decline in deals in comparison with the previous year, when VCs put a total of $871.7 million in 126 startups, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Thomson Reuters.
The decline in San Diego’s venture activity ran counter to the nationwide trend in 2011, in which $28.5 billion was invested in 3,673 deals—and ranks as the third-highest total in the past decade. The U.S. numbers represent a 22 percent increase over the $23.6 billion in 2010 VC funding and a 4 percent rise over the previous year’s deal count, according to the MoneyTree analysis.
The overall U.S. trend depicted in the MoneyTree Report generally agrees with the rise in venture activity nationwide that CB Insights charted last week in its 2011 findings. CB Insights, the New York financial analysis firm, said the $30.6 billion VCs invested in 3,051 deals throughout 2011 was a 10-year high in terms of both dollars and deals. (The two sets of numbers don’t line up exactly because the firms use different methods to collect their venture data, and count dollars and deals in different ways.)
In the fourth quarter of 2011, the MoneyTree Report shows that venture capitalists invested $269 million in 23 deals in the San Diego area, with life sciences startups in diagnostics, drugs, and devices accounting for roughly two-thirds of the transactions. It represented a
