Investments in Nashville's signature industry spurred the strongest start to the year for venture capital activity in at least a decade.
Companies in the region attracted nearly $500 million of venture capital funding in the first quarter of 2023, according to preliminary data from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association.
Two companies accounted for 92% of that funding:
- Monogram Health, which banked one of the region's biggest venture rounds ever, at $375 million;
- Wellvana Health, which reported an $84 million raise in March.
SimplyAgree, a platform that manages deal-closing tasks for attorneys, and Core10, a banking and financial technology company, each raised more than $6 million.
(The 2023 figure omits the $116 million of equity and debt raised by the maker of the fintech payroll app Rain, which the report attributed to the Nashville region's statistics. Rain has a growing downtown Nashville office, though its headquarters appear to remain in Los Angeles).
Revised data from PitchBook show that investment funds based in Nashville had an even larger record year in 2022 than initially thought, raising $918.5 million. PitchBook "constantly updated as new deals or information on past deals becomes available as well as the data entry lag," a spokesperson said.
Some of that momentum is continuing: Just one firm, health-tech investor FCA Venture Partners, closed a $71 million fund in the first quarter — and followed that up with a $90 million fund that the company announced Wednesday. Both funds attracted at least $20 million more than their initial targets.
