Big Wave of Q2 VC Funding Washes Ashore in San Diego with $222M

Torrey Pines State Park San Diego

So how did San Diego fare as the biggest wave of venture capital funding in 13 years swept across the United States, sloshing capital into startups from Silicon Valley to New York, and from Seattle to Houston?

The answer is just OK.

Venture capital firms invested a total of $222.4 million in 26 deals in the San Diego area during the second quarter of 2014, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association, and Thomson Reuters. The amount of dollars invested in San Diego declined by 15 percent from the $261.4 million that VCs put into 26 startups during the previous quarter, according to MoneyTree data. But it was a 22 percent gain from the $182.2 million that VCs put into 20 deals during the year-ago quarter of 2013.

(San Diego’s list of second-quarter Top 10 Deals is listed below.)

As we reported last week, VCs invested almost $13 billion into 1,114 U.S. startups nationwide during the second quarter, marking the biggest quarterly investment total since $13.1 billion was invested in the first quarter of 2001.

But the big nationwide surge wasn’t apparent in the MoneyTree data for San Diego. In fact, venture investing in San Diego so far this year is more characteristic of 2012, when the average quarterly investment was $239 million, than of 2001, when the average was $395 million a quarter (without factoring for inflation).

The breakout of second-quarter MoneyTree data shows that two-thirds of the $222.4 million invested in San Diego went into life sciences companies like Otonomy, which raised $49 million, and Cidara Therapeutics, which got $32 million. VCs invested a total of $27 million in nine San Diego software companies, with $20 million of that going to

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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.