The biggest quarterly infusion of capital so far this year was pumped into 24 young Pittsburgh tech companies during the three months ended Sept. 30.
In fact, the $121.37 million invested locally during the third quarter was more than the first two quarters combined.
The data was released early Thursday by the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. NVCA is short for National Venture Capital Association.
Five were eight-figure deals, led by Novasenta. The Oakland-based drug discovery firm, which is focused on immunotherapy treatment for cancer, raised a $20 million seed round. Investors included UPMC Enterprises.
CivicScience was second. The marketing intelligence company raised $15 million to support its newly launched media and advertising company, Rulo, from high-net-worth individuals including Thomas Tull, founder of Legendary Entertainment and the only Pittsburgher on the recently released Forbes 400, and Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon.com Inc.’s worldwide consumer business.
The others were Diamond Kinetics at $12 million, Carmell Therapeutics Corp. with $11 million; and Argo AI at $10 million.
“I’m always encouraged when several companies do eight-figure rounds,” said Jay Katarincic, managing partner at Draper Triangle Ventures and a founding partner of Magarac Venture Partners, a new venture capital fund announced in March. “It’s great to see everything from a therapeutics company to CivicScience attracting financing. That shows the broad base of the technology sector here.”
Ven Raju, Innovation Works CIO, noted that life sciences was the top local industry sector for obtaining financing during the third quarter, followed by artificial intelligence and robotics.
For the nine months, $228.04 million was invested in 71 companies.
Raju is looking for a strong finish to 2021.
“We have an IPO or two slated,” he said. “Generally, the fourth quarter bodes well for most ecosystems.”
Nationally, $82.8 billion was invested via 3,518 deals in the third quarter, PitchBook said, bringing year-to-date totals to $238.7 billion across 12,837 deals and surpassing the previous annual record of $166.4 billion that was set in 2020.
“The pace of activity across all facets of the U.S. VC ecosystem in 2021 has been astounding with many annual records already shattered before the fourth quarter even started,” John Gabbert, PitchBook founder and CEO, said in a prepared statement. “Existing companies and a healthy pipeline of new startups have found investors — especially nontraditional investors — are eager to deploy the record dry powder and write ever larger checks.”
