10 Aug Who Has the Right VC Numbers and Who Cares?
We started tracking VC funding in October 2008, as the financial markets were melting. What caught our eye in those dark and gloomy days was True Ventures’ announcement of its Series A investment in Syncplicity. The more we looked, the more we found that the headlines were wrong. It was not all doom and gloom, not in our corner of the universe: early-stage Web tech ventures. So we figured that getting (and passing on to you) good reliable data on a timely basis would be a good idea. Searching for that turned out to be harder than we thought, and herein lies a tale.
A Billion Here, a Billion There
For the quarter ending this past June, we compared the findings of three research firms that reported on the money invested in Q2:
* July 21, MoneyTree (PricewaterhouseCoopers, with data from the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters): $3.7 billion, with 612 deals,
* July 18, VentureSource (DowJones): $5.27 billion, with 595 deals,
* July 14, ChubbyBrain (a New York City-based startup partnering with ReadWriteWeb): $5.329 billion, with 613 deals.
VentureSource and ChubbyBrain seem to agree on the top line number. But MoneyTree’s number is what most people report, and that is about $1.5 billion different.
As the old saying goes, “A billion here, a billion there. Sooner or later it adds up.”
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