Monday, April 5, 2010
Q1 Southern California Venture Deals Rise To Around $1.4B
A quick analysis of venture capital deals in Q1, tracked by socalTECH, finds that there was around $1.4 billion in venture activity here in Q1, up significantly from around $997M tallied in Q4. The information--gleaned from funding announcements, regulatory filings, and other sources--are also up significantly from Q1 of last year, when only $729.89M was invested in the region. Biopharmaceuticals continues to drive the investment totals in Southern California, with $222M in investments; followed by Medical Devices, with $120M in investments, and Software, with $119M. The growing clean technology sector also helped numbers, with $74.0M in deals tracked by our database.
The biggest deal for the quarter was from Valencia-based U.S. Healthworks, an operator of occupational health care centers, which raised $175.0M. Other big funding deals included a big, $115.3M funding round from Irvine's Fisker Automotive, $30M for Irvine's NeoMend, $30M for San Diego's Tandem Diabetes, and $25.0M for Santa Monica electric vehicle firm Coda Automotive. Father north, in Santa Barbara, Sonos scored $25.0M in a March deal.
The most active venture firms in Southern California were Benchmark Capital, TPG Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures, with three deals each; followed by NBGI Ventures, JAFCO, Trinity Ventures, Venrock, Domain Associates, Sanderling, The Founder Collective, Anthem Ventures, DFJ Frontier, and Interwest Partners, all with two deals apiece. Interestingly, only Redpoint, Domain, Anthem, and DFJ Frontier have local offices in Southern California.
PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association, and VentureOne will release their quarterly nationwide results of venture activity later this month. Numbers from those firms usually differs--sometimes drastically--due to sources of information, timing of funding events, and classification of data.