Drum roll, please.
The most active U.S.-based VC firm in 2011 was New Enterprise Associates. Check out the slideshow below to see how active.
The firm, which is investing from its $2.5 billion 13th fund, put nearly $900 million to work in 2011 and invested more than $8.7 million per company.
The stats are based on data through mid-December from Thomson Reuters (publisher of this blog).
In all, Thomson Reuters reported that firms nationwide invested more than $40 billion this past year. When I crunched the numbers, I found that the top 20 most active firms invested nearly $5.3 billion, or 13% of the total. The top 30 firms invested more than $8 billion, or 20 percent.
I also found it interesting how much money, on average, the firms invested. Early stage investor True Ventures, which cracked the top 10, invested an average of $1.63 million into each company. Similarly, First Round Capital, which also focuses on early stage deals invested $1.34 million on average in companies this year, our data reported.
As you might expect, NEA, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, which all invest across stages, each averaged more than $8 million per company.
By the way, Andreessen Horowitz, which ranked as the 32nd most active firm based on our data, had one of the largest averages. It invested more than $10.2 million per company.
Photo by Morgan Lane Photography/Shutterstock.
No. 10 Canaan Partners
No. 9 True Ventures
No. 8 500 Startups
No. 7 First Round Capital
No. 5 (tied) Intel Capital
No. 5 (tied) Accel Partners
No. 4 Draper Fisher Jurvetson
No. 3 Sequoia Capital
No. 2 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
No. 1 New Enterprise Associates
# of Deals: 47
Average Invested: $3.79 million
Total Invested: $178 million
Sample Deals: Durata Therapeutics, Kabam, The Open Sky Project, Peer39 Inc., Virsto Software Corp.
# of Deals: 49
Average Invested: $1.34 million
Total: $65.57 million
Sample Deals: Appconomy Inc., Fitbit Inc., Klip Inc., Piston Cloud Computing, Yobongo
# of Deals: 57
Average Invested: $1.08 million
Total: $61.32 million
Sample Deals: Apsalar, BrightNest Inc., LucidChart, TaskRabbit, WeddingLovely
# of Deals: 60
Average Invested: $1.63 million
Total: $97.79 million
Sample Deals: Adaptly Inc., Bitcasa, Fab.com, Grubwithus, Path
# of Deals: 69
Average Invested: $3.7 million
Total: $255.43 million
Sample Deals: Adaptivity Inc., Kabam, mFoundry, SecureKey Technologies Inc., Xfire Inc.
# of Deals: 69
Average Invested: $4.71 million
Total: $325.32 million
Sample Deals: Cloudera Inc., Dropbox, GetJar Networks, Glam Media, RockMelt
# of Deals: 72
Average Invested: $2.39 million
Total: $171.78 million
Sample Deals: Box, Enevate Corp., Meebo, Opinionaided Inc., Sharpcast Inc.
# of Deals: 75
Average Invested: $8.17 million
Total: $612.85 million
Sample Deals: Dropbox, Druva Software Pvt. Ltd., Meebo, MoboTap Inc., Tumblr Inc.
# of Deals: 90
Average Invested: $8.27 million
Total: $744.74 million
Sample Deals: Chegg, Digital Chocolate, Fisker Automotive, Flipboard, Square
# of Deals: 100
Average Invested: $8.72 million
Total: $871.64 million
Sample Deals: Acadia Pharmaceuticals Inc., Box, Grubwithus Inc., Moximed Inc., Poggled Inc.
- Slideshow: Most Active VC Firms to Date in 2011
- Slideshow: A Slowdown for Most Active VC Firms in July
- Most Active VC firms in October: Slideshow
- Slideshow: Top Ten Most Active VCs for Q1; Brand Names Boost Deal Making: CORRECTED
- Most Active VC Firms of the Aughts
Drum roll, please.
Michael Frank said on December 28, 2011
Interesting article but I’m not sure this data is accurate / accurately presented:
1) The text of the article says FRC’s avg investment is $1.34 M while the slide show says there avg investment is $1.63
2) I’m pretty sure that where it says average investment, you mean total deal size (the size of all the invesment for that round). For example, based on the reported size of their funds, I’m almost positive that 500 startups did not invest an average of $1.08M in 57 deals this year but I can believe that that was the size of the average round they invested in split among a number of investors.
Boston Investor said on December 29, 2011
There’s no mention of the fact that every one of the 10 is located in Silicon Valley and/or San Francisco. What happened to East Coast investment?