Q3 2019 Pro Rata Newsletter Funding Data
Dan Primack is a prolific journalist who has covered the venture capital & private equity space for years. He currently produces the Pro Rata Newsletter at Axios. It’s a daily newsletter covering VC/PE news, fundings, M&A, personnel changes and more.
We’re always looking for ways to arm customers with more data, information and give them a better shot at fundraising. We figured Pro Rata Newsletter would be a good source of recent deal activity & decided to turn it into a structured data set for all of Q3.
For this initial project we decided to collect:
- Company Name
- Company URL
- Amount Raised
- Investors
- Date of Funding Announcement
- Company City/State
- Link to funding announcement
We used Airtable to start structuring the data. With a quick maps block we were able to get a snapshot of the Q3 deal activity locations.
The Airtable itself looks something like this. Important Note: These are just the September deals with funding amounts greater than $100M.
The breakdown of the data is below. If you want to get full access to the Airtable, just enter your email below and we’ll get you access.
Some quick caveats about the dataset.
- This was done by humans, there are likely errors.
- This is just activity from the Pro Rata newsletter. Not every funding announcement will be in here.
High Level Insights
- Total Deals: 696
- Total Funding Dollars Announced: $31,883,900,000 (keep in mind there are a lot of “undisclosed” nine-figure deals like Ibotta)
- Largest Deal: MYBank raised $871M
Geography Breakdown
- North America: 520
- 235 West Coast
- 95 East Coast
- 205 Across Heartland, Canada & Mexico
- Deal Count in Europe: 143
- India: 27
Metrics Powered by Visible
- Median Deal Size: $47M
- Average Deal Size: $18M
- Mode Deal Size: $10M
Our Thoughts
One of the things that immediately jumps out is the continuing trend of larger venture rounds. In Q3 ~12% of individual venture deals were larger than $100M! More venture capital is being invested than ever before. However, it is going to less companies (an example of the power law curve in VC).
If you’ve been following along at home, you’ve probably noticed the lackluster tech IPOs and talks of “quality revenue.” In short, Fred Wilson argues that (unprofitable/low margin) companies are being valued at the same multiples as software companies (higher margins) and are stumbling to hold their value once they hit the public markets.
Fewer companies are being formed than ever before. At the same time, more VC funds are being raised than ever before. This raises the question, “what effect does this have on the valuation of venture backed businesses?” With more investors and fewer companies, combined with the narrative of companies being valued at software multiples, one has to wonder how long these mega rounds and valuations can hold up.
What did you think of the Q3 data? We’d love your feedback, analysis, and any thoughts in general.
