First-Quarter Venture Funding Slumps in San Diego, and Top 10 Deals

iStock photo by emptyclouds

Thirty-seven venture-backed companies in the San Diego area collected almost $350 million in new funding during the first three months of 2017, according to data released this week as part of the latest Venture Monitor report from the National Venture Capital Association and Seattle-based PitchBook.

That was down 39 percent from the $574.5 million that VCs invested in San Diego startups in the same quarter in 2016, and off nearly 17 percent from the $420.3 million invested in the prior quarter, according to PitchBook data.

Nationally, VC investments continued to decelerate in the first quarter, with some $16.5 billion invested in 1,797 deals nationwide, according to the report. That marked a nearly 12 percent decline in dollars and a 24 percent drop in deals from the first quarter of 2016.

San Diego life sciences companies got most of the $350 million in venture funding that was invested in the first quarter. San Diego’s top 10 deals, listed below, all involved life sciences companies that together claimed nearly $252 million, or 72 percent of first-quarter venture funding in the region.

San Diego’s deal count also was down. The 37 companies that got funded in the first quarter were roughly half the 75 deals that PitchBook counted in the same quarter last year, and off almost 29 percent from the 52 deals in the prior quarter.

As a point of comparison, or perhaps a tale of two cities, Xconomy Seattle editor Ben Romano reported that venture firms invested $300 million in Seattle startups during the first quarter—a 33 percent surge over the same quarter in 2016.

Seattle’s deal count also climbed to 68, with biotech and medical device companies claiming four of the region’s 10 biggest deals.

Here are San Diego’s top 10 first-quarter deals, based on PitchBook data from the Venture Monitor report.

Vividion Therapeutics $50 million BioPharma
F1 Oncology $44 million Anti-cancer
Biological Dynamics $28.9 million Anti-cancer
Dauntless Pharmaceuticals $25 million BioPharma
Jecure Therapeutics $20 million BioPharma
Neurelis $20 million BioPharma
Oncternal Therapeutics $18.4 million Anti-cancer
Genoa Pharmaceuticals $16.6 million BioPharma
Avidity Biosciences $16 million BioPharma
Echo Laboratories $12.9 million Healthtech

 

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.