Connecticut venture capital investment came to a screeching halt in the first quarter of 2016 with only six companies raising funds.
Get Instant Access to This Article
Subscribe to Hartford Business Journal and get immediate access to all of our subscriber-only content and much more.
- Critical Hartford and Connecticut business news updated daily.
- Immediate access to all subscriber-only content on our website.
- Bi-weekly print or digital editions of our award-winning publication.
- Special bonus issues like the Hartford Book of Lists.
- Exclusive ticket prize draws for our in-person events.
Click here to purchase a paywall bypass link for this article.
Connecticut venture capital investment came to a screeching halt in the first quarter of 2016 with only six companies raising funds.
Venture capitalists injected $9.6 million in Connecticut companies during the first quarter of 2016, down from $57.6 million a year earlier.
Overall, six Connecticut companies received funding during the January to March period, compared to 13 a year earlier, according to the latest MoneyTree report, a joint effort of PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), using data from Thomson Reuters.
Nationally, total venture dollars deployed to startup companies for the quarter remained flat and total deal count was down 5 percent. A total of $12 billion was invested in 1,021 deals.
The slow first-quarter deal activity was attributed to nontraditional investors scaling back their investment activity and refocusing on their core businesses, said Bobby Franklin, president and CEO of the NVCA.
Meantime, Tom Ciccolella, U.S. venture capital market leader at PwC, said there is a continuing shift among investors to focus on relatively mature startups, making it harder for early-stage companies to attract investment. Nationally, the top 10 deals accounted for 25 percent of total dollars invested in the first quarter, up from 18 percent of total venture capital deployed during the fourth quarter.
Danbury specialty pharmaceutical company Perosphere Inc. scored Connecticut's biggest deal raising $4.1 million from an undisclosed firm. Norwalk's Logicsource Inc. had the second biggest deal raising $2 million — also from an undisclosed investor.
