Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

We just posted the numbers this morning: according to our day to day tracking of Southern California VC deals, there was over $1 billion in venture investments in Southern California this quarter–an astounding number. When I first ran the numbers this weekend I had to double check to make sure that the numbers added up, but if you track all the venture deals in Southern California (which is pretty detailed), indeed, there was quite a bit of activity here and the numbers total to over a $1B in investment.

Looking through the list of fundings, the numbers were boosted in two ways: one was a very significant amount of biotech and medical product investments, particularly in San Diego; plus, a number of large deals (Amp’d Mobile and Altra come to mind)–Amp’d in the very capital intensive MVNO space, and Altra likewise in the capital intensive alternative energy area.

PricewaterhouseCoopers/NVCA and Ernst & Young/VentureOne will release their results in the next couple of weeks, and it should be interesting to compare. Their numbers are usually based on self-reported investments from venture firms, so it’s interesting to see the number of deals which were not announced or not yet disclosed (which we don’t catch), and what their own totals will look like.  Private Equity Week’s Dan Primack also alluded to the gain in venture investing here yesterday in his newsletter (snippet below). It should be interesting to look at the various numbers as they come out. Primack’s quote below:

…Venture capital data is still being compiled, but a quick look behind the curtain indicates that Southern California has beefed up its lead on New England….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007 at 8:17 am and is filed under Venture Capital. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.