In the first quarter of 2024, deal counts across Colorado were slightly down but capital raised increased marginally.
Colorado businesses raised nearly $1.17 million across 90 deals in the first quarter of the year, according to PitchBook’s Q1 NVCA Venture Monitor, as compared to the approximately $1.12 million raised across 116 deals in Q1 2023.
Regardless of the slight fluctuation, U.S. venture capital-backed company count is greater than 55,000, with late-stage and growth-stage counts doubling since 2018. This demonstrates competition in the market, PitchBook founder and CEO John Gabbert said in a statement.
According to PitchBook’s lead venture capital analyst Kyle Stanford, deal activity is not expected to pick up in a meaningful way in the near term.
Even though capital availability across the U.S. remains slow, Colorado companies managed to secure millions in capital last month.
The five largest rounds raised by Colorado businesses totaled a collective $119.6 million in April, slightly up from the $103.5 million raised by the largest rounds in March but down from February’s total of $347.2 million.
Three out of the five companies that raised the largest funding rounds in Colorado last month are based in Boulder.
Related content: Has Boulder lost its luster? For those in the local tech community, the answer is not so simple.
Quadratic — $5.6 million
Boulder-based Quadratic secured a $5.6 million seed round led by Google Ventures to continue building its platform. The spreadsheet company allows engineers, data scientists and business analysts to pull data from several sources and work through the information with tools like SQL and Pandas. This isn’t Quadratic’s first raise. It pulled in $5 million in mid-August.
Backflip — $15 million
Backflip, a remote-first startup with founders and executives in Colorado and Dallas, Texas, is a real estate fintech company building technology for single-family home investors. Its end-to-end platform helps real estate entrepreneurs find and analyze properties and secure financing. New York-based FirstMark Capital, a firm that was an early investor in Airbnb and Shopify, led Backflip’s $15 million Series A in late April.
Aidium — $19 million
Named a Colorado Inno Startup to Watch in 2024, Aidium provides loan officers with customer relationship management software that also assists them with marketing, leads, content creation, referrals and automation. The Boulder-based startup closed a $19 million Series A last month, having received a portion of the funding — $7 million — last year and the rest this year at a higher company valuation. Aidium’s CEO Spencer Dusebout declined to share the startup’s valuation but said its revenue grew more than 60% last year.
Netgain Solutions — $35 million
Englewood-based Netgain Solutions aims to modernize accounting with its software solutions that automate and simplify tedious tasks and necessary accounting processes. The company, which raised a $35 million investment from Summit Partners, said with its software every accountant becomes a “visionary of economic strategy” and each business gets access to “on-the-spot, actionable financial insights.” Netgain works with more than 1,600 customers and has increased its new customer logos by 400% in the last two years, according to Greg Goldfarb, a managing director at Summit Partners.
ION Clean Energy — $45 million
This Boulder company commercializing carbon capture processes it developed raised $45 million in early April. The Series A round was led by Chevron New Energies (CNE), a division of Chevron U.S.A. Inc., and will help ION Clean Energy expand the scale of its business and deploy its carbon-capture tech. ION Clean Energy was founded 15 years ago and now has 25 employees.
