San Diego Startups Raise $287M in Third Quarter, and Top 10 Deals

iStock photo by emptyclouds

Venture Capital investments in San Diego startups fell by roughly a third during the three months that ended September 30, according to data released recently by Seattle-based PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association.

VC firms invested $280.6 million in 49 startups in San Diego County during the third quarter, according to a breakout of data provided by PitchBook as part of the inaugural “Venture Monitor” report.

That was 32 percent lower than the $414.4 million that venture firms invested in San Diego during the prior quarter, although the deal count was up by 10 percent from the 39 companies that received funding. The latest quarter also was down by 33 percent from the same quarter in 2015, when VCs pumped $420.3 million into 61 local companies.

In the biggest deal of the quarter, Carlsbad, CA-based Ostendo Technologies raised $42 million in mid-July to advance its virtual reality display technology.

As Xconomy reported last week, third-quarter venture funding also slipped nationwide to $14.99 billion in 1,810 funding deals in 1,796 companies. Here is a list of San Diego’s top 10 deals of the quarter, based on PitchBook data:

Ostendo Technologies Carlsbad, CA $42 million
Tealium San Diego $35 million
Singlera Genomics San Diego $20 million
Avelas Biosciences San Diego $20 million
Fortis Therapeutics San Diego $18 million
Histogen San Diego $16 million
Medsphere Systems Carlsbad, CA $15 million
CellSavers San Diego $15 million
Progenity San Diego $12 million
AristaMD San Diego $11 million

 

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.