Wednesday, April 1, 2009

VC IPO Drought Continues

The drought in the IPOs of U.S., venture backed companies continued in Q1, according to numbers released by Dow Jones VentureSource. According to the firm, total merger and acquisition activity only totaled $3.2 billion in the first quarter of 2009, down 65 percent from the $9.1 billion generated in liquidity last year. The numbers were the lowest quarterly totals since 2003. Interestingly enough the news for Southern California companies was not all bad--two Southern California exits, both sales to Medtronic, made up 30% of the venture liquidity in the quarter. Dow Jones said that Medtronic's $700M acquisition of Irvine-based CoreValve was the largest M&A transaction, with the $225M purchase of Carlsbad-based Ablation Frontiers boosting the total.