As Q4 unfolds before us, we bid farewell to the last three months of Cincy innovation with our inaugural Queen City Quarterly Report, a roundup of the fundings, deals, mergers and acquisitions to go down in the region in the quarter.
Below, we've compiled a list of the biggest Cincinnati tech and startup headlines from Q3, including Astronomer's round and Datalliance's acquisition. Not counting the deals with undisclosed terms, the total from these fundings, mergers and acquisitions add up to just north of $858 million.
Q3 was productive for Cincy's ecosystem in other ways, too. Take Axios' report on Refinery Venture's late September SEC filing, in which the new venture capital firm disclosed it was looking to raise $100 million for its debut fund, $11 million of which it's already secured.
Outside of Cincinnati, it was an extraordinarily strong quarter for the state, as well. According to PriceWaterhouseCooper and CB Insights' Money Tree report — a roundup of venture capital activity by state and region - Ohio raised a total of $380M in investment across 16 deals. The total amount is the state's largest in a single quarter since the dot com era and is up significantly over last quarter ($66M total) and Q3, 2016 ($30.9M).
However, it's important to note that this total is anchored by one single deal — fintech startup Klarna's $250M round —rather than a reflection of a particularly seismic shift in the state's investment activity. (Klarna is a Swedish startup with its headquarters in Columbus, Ohio). In fact, it can be argued that deal count rather than deal volume is a more apt measurement of an ecosystem's health, and in Q3, Ohio's number of deal (16) were down from last quarter (19) and down from Q3, 2016 (26).
Yet surface-level optics matter when it comes to measuring startup hubs against one another and Ohio's $380M Q3 was the 8th most in the quarter, ahead of Texas, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Colorado, and behind California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Georgia, Washington and Illinois.
If we're missing something in the below roundup, drop us a line. Now let's get to the Queen City Quarterly Report...
July
• ActionStream, a wireless wearable live streaming platform, raised $1.88 million from CincyTech, with participation from Vine Street Ventures.
• Data engineer platform Astronomer raised $3.5 million in a round led by Wireframe Ventures. Other firms, such as Frontline Ventures, Drummond Road, Grand Ventures, Core Network, M25 Group and Silicon Valley Bank, also joined the round.
• Hawaiian Telcom, Inc. and Cincinnati Bell Inc. merged. The total consideration was an estimated $650 million. Meanwhile, CBI acquired OnX Enterprise Solutions for $201 million.
August
• Kyocera Corp. bought Cincinnati-based Senco Brands Inc, a leader in power fastening technology, from Wynnchurch Capital for an undisclosed amount.
• Death-care management platform CRäKN raised an undisclosed amount from Queen City Angels.
• The Family Independence Initiative received $2.4 million in funding from the the GreenLight Fund, in partnership with the Greater Cincinnati Foundation.
September
• Cincinnati-based vendor managed inventory service Datalliance was acquired by Accelerator-KKR portfolio company TrueCommerce. The terms were undisclosed.
(Fundings were compiled from SEC filings, Fortune's Term Sheet newsletter, and the National Venture Capital Association).
