VCs Invest $243M in San Diego Startups in Q1, Tech Drought Continues

Money Tree

[Corrected 4/18/14, 7:40 am See below.] Venture capital firms invested $243 million in 23 deals in the San Diego area during the first quarter that ended in March, according to data from the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association, and Thomson Reuters.

It was a strong upturn in the amount of capital invested, representing a 67 percent increase over the $145.5 million that VCs invested in San Diego startups during the previous quarter, and a 20 percent rise over the $203 million invested during the first quarter of 2013, according to MoneyTree Data.

The deal count remained more or less comparable. There were 24 deals in the previous quarter, and 27 in the same quarter of 2013.

[Corrected total for life sciences] About $178 million—or 73 percent of the total invested in the region during the quarter—went into 13 life sciences companies.

In the single biggest deal of the quarter, San Diego’s Lumena Pharmaceuticals raised $45.5 million from Alta Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Pappas Ventures, RA Capital Management, RiverVest Venture Partners, and Adage Capital Management. The three-year-old company, founded to develop new oral drugs for treating a rare group of metabolic disorders and liver diseases, recently filed for an IPO.

A new San Diego startup called Human Longevity Inc. (HLI) made the list, but without much information. HLI is a genetic services startup founded by the genetic entrepreneur J. Craig Venter, former Celgene executive Robert Hariri, and Peter Diamandis of the X Prize Foundation. Venter told reporters in early March that HLI had raised $70 million in a funding round led by

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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.