Author: Michael Greeley
Publisher: PEHub
Date: July 23, 2012
Last week the National Venture Capital Association (where I am on the Executive Committee) and Thomson Reuters announced the 2Q12 fundraising data for venture firms – don’t worry, you are excused if you did not see the results. Not pretty. The data has some potentially troubling implications for entrepreneurs, not just GP’s.
While the headline looked encouraging with $5.9BN raised this past quarter, which ironically compares very favorably to many of the recent quarters since the Great Recession started over four years ago, it is the details which are more disturbing. If you annualized last quarter’s pace you might conclude that the VC industry is back to raising around $25BN per year – which is about how much we as an industry invest each year. But as you can see in the chart below, the number of firms which raised capital (38) is very much a low water mark and most of the capital went to a small number of firms.
So why am I so disturbed by these results? Couple of high/low lights in the detailed data:
-Of the 38 firms which successfully raised new funds this past quarter, only five firms (NEA, IVP, Lightspeed, Kleiner, Mithril (Peter Thiel)) accounted for nearly 80% of the total dollars raised
-Of the top five funds raised, four were at least the ninth fund that firm had raised
