A packed house filled up TSRB this week for the quarterly DLA Piper Venture Pipeline event.
John Hurley kicked things off by talking a bit about DLA’s Venture Pipeline program. Venture Pipeline is a dedicated team of non-lawyers experienced in technology, startups, and the venture capital markets that take a formalized approach to helping entrepreneurs raise capital on a no direct fee basis.
The VP approach has three tiers: screen by applying VC standards to gauge potential for success; scrub by critically accessing the business plan and provide coaching/feedback on investor docs and presentation; and shop to introduce clients to the right funding sources through the right channels.
John then shared some interesting numbers on VC investment in Georgia for the first half of 2008. John and his numbers were upbeat. The Southeast market is moving up. But money does continue to move to later stage investments where there is less risk.
In the first half of this year 40 companies in Georgia closed institutional funding. This includes ATDC member companies Biofisica, Clearleap, Global Crypto, Qualtre, Solohealth, and Suniva as well as nine companies that have graduated from the incubator program. These 40 Georgia comapnies raised a total of $282 million, well ahead of the pace of 2007, while the number of deals declined from 43 to 40. You can chalk up the diff to the Suniva effect.
From a round type things looked like this:
- Seed: 3%
- Series A 24%
- Series B 11%
- Bridge 14%
- Later 32%
And 16% was other (whatever in the heck that means).
Even more interesting then the round type is the stage of the company when they raised funds:
- Startup: 3%
- Product Dev: 19%
- Clinical Trials: 8%
- Product Avail: 59%
- Profitable: 11%
Clearly well over 70% of companys getting venture funding in Georgia have product on the market. And that 3% number in "Startup" equates to one company.
After John layed all this out Doug Spear moderated a spirited discussion by Lon Chow of Apex Ventures, Carter Griffin of Updata, and Garheng Kong of Intersouth. The key takeaway from this discussion was that Atlanta is a very attractive market for venture captial investing due to diverse deal flow, deep management talent, good infrastruture, collaborative effects, and our risk taking attitude.
If you are eager to learn more about the VC environment in Atlanta wrangle yourself an invite to this next quarter.