Wednesday, July 5, 2006
Southern California Sees Healthy VC Investments for Q2
Southern California saw a healthy $817M invested in the last quarter in 59 deals in Q2, a continued increase in both venture activity, according to socalTECH's latest numbers in our venture capital deal tracking database. The total investment compared to $759M in investment for the first quarter. Southern California saw a total of 59 deals announced in the last quarter, including 20 deals in April, 16 deals in May, and 23 deals in June. The biggest deals this quarter included a $150M investment in MVNO Amp'd Mobile announced in April; $150M invested in Foundation 9, a video game developer; and $120M in Demand Media, a domain name aggregator headed by Richard Rosenblatt, former chairman of MySpace. The most active venture capital and angel investment firms in Southern California in the last quarter included the Tech Coast Angels, with 6 deals; Oak Investment Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, both with 4 deals; followed by Intel Capital and Enterprise Partners with 3 deals. The most popular investment areas were Software, with 11 deals; Content and Media, with 8 deals; followed by Electronics, Information Services, and Medical Devices with 6 deals each. These venture numbers are derived from socalTECH's own venture database, which includes deals which have been announced or reported to socalTECH in the quarter. The deal dates used in the totals are announcement dates, not close dates, so some deals may represent prior quarter close dates. socalTECH provides a premium service in addition to our news coverage that tracks day-to-day venture capital activity in Southern California. PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association should release their popular Money Tree results later this month. VentureOne/Ernst & Young also release their quarterly VC numbers in July.