San Diego’s Top 10 Venture Deals: Most of the Money Goes to Life Sciences

[Corrected 4/19/10, 1:00 pm. VentiRx Pharmaceuticals CEO Michael Kamdar says the company raised $25 million, not $12.5 million. See below.] The folks who count every leaf that falls off the money tree for venture-backed startups have graciously provided a breakout of the 10 biggest VC deals in San Diego so far this year. This list was drawn primarily from the MoneyTree Report, which is prepared by the National Venture Capital Association, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Thomson Reuters. We’ve supplemented the list with information from the archives of Xconomy San Diego—since we wrote stories about all of these deals—as well as regional data provided by Dow Jones VentureSource.

While the MoneyTree survey counted $222 million invested in 29 deals in the San Diego area, it’s still a relatively small sum for this region. I’ve got more on that, but first, here’s our list of the top 10 deals from the first quarter:

1. Tandem Diabetes Care (San Diego), $31 million, second tranche of Series C.

2. PatientSafe Solutions (San Diego) $30 million, undisclosed round.

3. Tioga Pharmaceuticals (San Diego) $18 million, undisclosed round.

4. Sotera Wireless (San Diego) $17.45 million, undisclosed round.

5. Genomatica (San Diego) $15 million, Series C.

6. Elevation Pharmaceuticals (San Diego) $14.96 million, Series A.

7. EMN8 (San Diego) $14.46 million, undisclosed round.

8. VentiRx Pharmaceuticals (San Diego and Seattle) $25 million, extended Series A.

9. Avaak (San Diego) $10 million, Series B.

10. AwarePoint (San Diego) $10 million, Series E.

The top 10 deals on the list account for $173.35 million, or roughly 78 percent, of the $222.5 million that venture investors sunk into 29 deals in the San Diego area during the first quarter of 2010, according to

Pages: Page 1, Page 2

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.