Congratulations to this year’s winners of the Los Angeles Venture Association‘s annual Venture Awards! LAVA–which tapped the resources and venture database at socalTECH to help come up with their list–gave out seven awards last night at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica. The group also awarded a special “LAVA Hall of Fame” award to venture capitalist Jon Funk, who had notable success at Allegis Capital, providing over 1.6 billion in liquidity to investors. I’ve attended a number of prior LAVA Venture Awards events, and this one was pretty well attended (230 or so folks, according to LAVA). It was also a really good year, as exits and financings go, particularly for anyone who remembers a number of years ago when there were essentially no IPOs, and few M&A deals to go around.

LAVA’s complete list of winners:

Best Venture Funding in Internet/eCommerce: TrueCar

Best Venture Funding in Internet/Ad Technology: SocialVibe

Best Venture Financing in Clean Technology and Energy: CODA Automotive

Hottest First Time Venture Funding: BetterWorks

Best IPO Exit: Cornerstone OnDemand

Best M&A Exit: Riot Games

Most Capital Efficient Exit: Accordant Technologies

Jon Funk’s award was particularly well received, although Jon (explaining that he was an engineer at heart, and therefore an introvert) was definitely nervous–enough to merit a humorous request for a shot of tequila in his acceptance speech, which someone actually made happen. Jon Funk’s best known exits are Sandpiper Networks (Westlake Village, acquired for $630 million in 2000 by Digital Island), Rent.com (Santa Monica, acquired for $430 million in 2004 by eBay) and Shopzilla (West Lost Angeles, acquired for $560 million in 2005 by the E.W. Scripps Company). Jon has been a regular contributor of analysis of the exits and investments here for socalTECH.

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Awards by Benjamin Kuo