With $346 million in funding going to D.C. area technology companies between January 1 and April 1, the local business scene seems to be shrugging off suggestions that a venture capital financing bubble exists. The top deal saw Glen Allen, Va.-based Snagajob scoop a $100 million investment to rapidly expand their customer base and to develop new products.
On Friday, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) revealed data showing that 38 local companies received cash from private, institutional investors since the start of the year—this excludes angel investor activity and pre-Seed round financing.
Nationally, the report interestingly shows a slight uptick in funding deal dollars: from $12 billion to $12.1 billion though there were 5 percent less deals made in total. This financial study, called the Moneytree report, combines research contributed by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) alongside the NVCA and Thomson Reuters. The Moneytree report does not include deals made by corporate investors, like Google Ventures.
DC Inno received data specific to the D.C. region from the NVCA.
Importantly, the $346 million raised in Q1 2016 represents a relative year-over-year increase of $9 million, from about $337 million. During this same quarter in 2014, 2013 and 2012, the D.C. area attracted $222, $302 and $221 million, respectively.
The numbers suggest that D.C. isn't hurting for cash on a macro level, but that isn't to say that some industries—like civic technology—aren't hurting for financing, locally. Additionally, the majority of D.C. area investment went to later stage tech companies: $194 of the $346 million to be exact. Again, to be clear, our data set includes information related to D.C., Maryland and Virginia companies.
While the MoneyTree report tends to be one of the most recognizable sources for updated startup funding information, another Q1 venture financing report from VentureSource, as reported on by the Wall Street Journal, paints a drastically different picture.
According to the Venture Source Q1 report, there was a 25 percent decline in venture capital firm disbursements to U.S. companies between Q4 2015 and Q1 2016.
Clearly, that's a big drop off in just a matter of months, which could support the idea that a funding bubble is in fact bursting as some have suggested. Fortune's Dan Primack, however, writes that discrepancies between the two reports may be due to how each group accounts for hedge fund and mutual fund investments. Also of note: the reports differ on the recognized dates for when specific deals happened. Lyft's $1 billion raise in January, for instance, was listed as having happened in Q4 by VentureSource but MoneyTree notes the deal for Q1.
Here's some of the biggest deals in Q1 for DC Tech:
- Fulton, Md. - cybersecurity firm Sonatype Inc. raised $25 million
- Reston, Va. - data analytics and visualization startup Zoomdata raised $24.99 million
- Arlington, Va. - cloud data storage services co. Federated Wireless LLC raised $22 million
- Frederick, Md. - cloud data storage startup Fugue raised $20 million
- Washington, D.C. - software creator Interfolio raised $12.2 million
