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Quickly, a small note about upcoming changes: We are hoping to deprecate our “Technology Growth” category in the next round of reports (when Q4 ends) as the metric has lost its way in the Softbank era. We’re also working on a charting UI update that looks awesome as heck.

That aside, let’s begin.

Global VC

Our Q3 global report was our most comprehensive to date. It is packed with more charts than I want to recall fact-checking.

Happily, projections paint an impressively rosy picture of the global venture market, which, by our numbers, is at its highest mark since the Dot-com boom.

According to Crunchbase’s projections, both deal and dollar volume are at record highs since the Dot-Com bubble. Q3 2017 surpasses previous highs reached in Q1 2016, a quarter that was followed by a number of sequential down quarters.

The good times, if they ever really left, are back and nearly bigger than ever before. This is what an upgrade looks like:

US VC

The domestic market was a bit rougher in terms of exits in the third quarter, but there were positive signs all around.

In fact, late-stage venture investment hit its “highest level in five quarters by both round count and total dollars invested” in the third quarter. For early-stage investors looking for markups, that must be welcome.

But funding amounts were dicier amidst the early stages, and there was some slack among exits:

U.S. startup investors were good at putting capital to work this past quarter. They weren’t as good at getting it back.

Those are two standout trends for the venture investment landscape in the domestic third quarter of 2017, according to reported and projected data from Crunchbase. Data shows a rise in late-stage funding and a stabilizing early-stage funding environment. Acquisitions and IPO activity, by comparison, were lackluster.

The US VC market is a critical player in the global VC market, but the two aren’t the same thing. What will be noticeable when the current bull cycle fades is which takes the downturn more steeply. We’ll be watching.

Women In Venture Update

As a follow-up to the 2016 women in venture report, Crunchbase’s Gené Teare wrote “The 2017 Update To The Crunchbase Women In Venture Report.”

The data is super interesting. Cribbing verbatim, here are the three points that stood out the most during my reads:

Women now hold 15 percent of the partner roles at accelerators and corporate venture firms, a 25 percent improvement in 18 months.

Women founded 16 micro-venture funds in the last three years, 21 percent of all the new firms in that category.

Among the top 100 venture firms, the percentage of women partners edged up to 8 percent from 7 percent, an increase of 17 percent.

US vs. The World: Early-Stage Funding Showdown

A new entrant into our quarterly mix, the News team tracked the percent of funding in dollar-terms that domestic startups versus international startups raised, on a per-quarter interval.

We went to the third quarter of 2016, and the chart isn’t exactly great for the US market. The US is losing primacy to the rest of the world in terms of early-stage dollars, but that comes with the following caveat:

First, the most-recent-quarter was not a local maximum for U.S. early-stage fundraising. The first quarter shown above, Q3’2016, was more active in terms of dollars.

However, the most-recent-quarter’s global tally is a local maximum, coming in at the highest dollar amount for the quarters charted above. So the declines are not driven by shared directional shifts, of which the world is getting the better cut. Instead, the U.S. is moving independent of the global early-stage market.

So the following chart is perhaps a bit exaggerated by bad luck more than anything else. Here’s the data:

One country controlling over 40 percent of early-stage dollars is still a lot. But it’s also a lot less than 55 percent.

Everything Is Smaller In Texas

Forging ahead, we went back to Texas this quarter to get a look at the state following Q2 2017. The short tally: what goes up must come down.

How far the fallen? From the piece:

Venture capitalists put $268.2 million into Texas startups across 38 known deals in the third quarter of 2017. In perspective, that is less than what was invested in all of Austin alone during the second quarter.

One reason that we look at these results each and every quarter is that any particular number can gyrate outside of its trend. But with historical data behind us, we can mentally correct for outlying periods.

To frame the slack in Texas’s quarter, here’s the state’s data going back to 2012:

What does it all mean? Probably that we are about seventeen dozen quarters into a massive run in the public markets and nothing can run forever without taking a break.

AI Investment In Focus

Investing in AI-focused companies hit a local-maximum dollar high, but a local-minimum round low in the third quarter.

It’s an odd result that looks like this in chart form:

What will be interesting to see over the next few quarters will be whether the round rounds will keep falling while the money keeps printing.

Probably not.

Global Charts

We did our roundup of all global charts:

US Charts

We did a new roundup of all US charts:

Current Status of Crunchbase News

Or something close to it. Thanks to you all for reading and sharing the above-listed work. It means a lot to our little crew.

We’ll be back with more when the quarter ends. Until then, stay up with us on .

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In the following SlideShare, we have included every chart and graph from the global report. The following charts provided the raw data behind Crunchbase News’s conclusions regarding the past quarter’s venture results that we broke into two key categories.

First, the bullish:

According to Crunchbase’s projections, both deal and dollar volume are at record highs since the Dot-Com bubble. Q3 2017 surpasses previous highs reached in Q1 2016, a quarter that was followed by a number of sequential down quarters.

And second, the bearish:

Despite significant growth in nearly all metrics connected to early and late-stage growth, the market for seed and angel deals may be showing signs of stagnation. Projected dollar volumes and reported mean and median deal sizes have remained flat since Q2.

So we are at a local maximum, but cracks are evident in the current bullish cycle. Such has it been for some time. Regardless, click through the following presentation and be informed.

This is our second-to-last Q3 piece, aside from tomorrow’s roundup. All good things must come to an end, and we are done with this cycle.

iStockPhoto / polygraphus

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From the highest possible vantage point, it was notable that the global VC market was so healthy, partially in contrast to the United States’ own market. That the United States’ venture space posted mixed signals, especially regarding exits while we sit at the current peak of the public markets was both notable and worrying.

But, as with every quarter, we shouldn’t over-speculate as to what will happen next. It’s enough for today to understand what did happen.

To that end, we are again breaking out the charts from our two largest reports — the US piece and our global behemoth — into Slideshares for your consumption.

So, without further ado, here are a host of charts and tables and data from our report on our domestic market:

We’ll have another piece out today with the global charts, and a full-size roundup tomorrow. Then we can put this down and not touch the subject again until the fourth quarter closes.

iStockPhoto / iconeer

(Note that numbers will likely go up as more deals are reported, but are likely not significant enough to make the above statement untrue.)

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Venture capitalists put $268.2 million into Texas startups across 38 known deals in the third quarter of 2017. In perspective, that is less than what was invested in all of Austin alone during the second quarter. VC funding in the Lone Star state was down a whopping 56 percent compared to the $609.7 million raised in the second quarter, and 21 percent lower versus last year’s third quarter.

Deal volume is also particularly low for Q3 2017. Between 2012 and 2016 (inclusive), the third quarter saw an average of count of 121.8 deals.

, vice president of client strategy of Austin-based technology and venture capital practice group, believes the dip is due to a variety of factors.

“The biggest and most likely is that there aren’t enough companies that can accept larger Series A or Series B deals right now,” noted Nathan, who is also publisher of the .

Another contributing factor is that a number of Texas-based venture capital firms are in the fundraising mode of their lifecycle. Austin-based , for example, is in the process of a $110 million raise.

“This activity takes time and attention away from new investments,” Nathan added. On top of that, “older deals are getting follow-on funding from past investors, which also takes capital away from new deals.”

Life Finds A Way

On the positive side, newer funds such as are making $4 to $5 million investments at a steady clip, according to Nathan.

, managing partner of Dallas-based , believes it’s tough to look at funding on a quarterly basis.

“The deals that really drive the bulk of the total dollars invested in a quarter are usually larger deals, and those come in chunks,” he said.

However, Hays conceded, the quarter “felt slow, in terms of deal flow and closings in Dallas.”

In an interview earlier this year, CEO told Crunchbase News she does feel Austin lacks some “think big global perspective.” While Austin may be a great place for startups, Brunner would like to see the city’s small-to-midsize companies think bigger.

Austin Reigns Supreme

In the second quarter, the Texas capital showed impressive results with startups collectively raising $423.7 million over 45 deals. But for the three months ended Sept. 30, 2017, Austin companies raised just $143.4 million across 22 deals. The dollar amount was not much lower than the $144.6 million raised in the 2017 first quarter; however, deal volume was significantly less than the 41 rounds reported in that time period.

One Austin deal in particular stood out because of its size – the above-mentioned $40 million raised by auto insurance comparison marketplace in a Series B round led by out of Palo Alto.

The Zebra has raised a total of $63 million since it was founded in 2012 by then 25-year-old high school dropout (a Forbes 30 Under 30 winner). Other investors include Dallas investor , Palo Alto-based and Austin-based .

As part of the latest funding round, Accel and The Zebra tapped , former president of travel metasearch engine KAYAK as its new CEO.

The investment was a bright light in an otherwise bleak quarter.

Still, LiveOak Venture Partners founding general partner remains bullish on the Austin startup scene. He said he finds it hard to make trend conclusions based on quarterly aggregate data.

“It might be one large financing, or a financing that slipped into an adjacent quarter especially a later stage one that skews the numbers,” he told Crunchbase News. “I would not attach much significance to it.  The activity is fantastic which perhaps might be reflected in the number of earlier stage deals.”

In fact, Srinivasan said 2017 has been one of his firm’s most active years with five new investments so far. LiveOak describes itself as an “early-stage, lead investor” that will “opportunistically lead late-stage financings.”

“If you look at the five companies we invested in this year, they are all repeat entrepreneurs who have been there and done that who are doing something new and interesting,” he added. “We’re seeing a lot of strong repeat entrepreneurs coming back into the market to start new companies.’

Also, in all five deals, LiveOak had a co-investor that came from outside of Texas. Those investors hailed from New York, California, and Toronto, specifically.

“Overall, we saw great activity in the quarter,” Srinivasan. “It was one of our busiest summers ever in terms of both new and follow-on activity.”

Dallas

During the third quarter, eight Dallas startups raised $52.6 million compared to 21 startups raising $142.6 million in the previous quarter. The dollar amount, at least, was higher than the $46.6 million reported in the first quarter, although there was less than half the number of deals.

The city did see a couple of large deals close in the quarter, and they made up most of the city’s total venture investment. The deals included a $30 million round  by Carrolton-based r – an energy project investment company – and a $20 million raise by financial services startup out of Dallas.

While Deep Space Ventures’ Hays acknowledged that things felt “slow” in Dallas in the third quarter, he is optimistic about early-stage funding in Texas as a whole.

“I feel like there is a lot of momentum at the early stage across the state with the expansion of (Austin-based incubator) into Houston, Dallas and San Antonio,” he said. “The ecosystem is really coming together across cities within the state, which is creating opportunity and value for investors and founders alike.”

Houston

Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas’s largest city in August. The storm forced many residents out of their homes and many companies out of their office space.

Ironically, Houston is the only city out of the state’s major cities for fundraising that saw an increase in the amount of venture capital raised in the third quarter. That was largely due to the above-mentioned $50 million raise by HighRadius. Overall, funding climbed to $67.2 million for the quarter compared to $42.1 million raised in the second quarter.

, co-founder of ., was one of those whose home flooded and family displaced as a result of Hurricane Harvey. Still, the startup managed to close on $500,000 in seed funding during the quarter with plans to raise another $500,000 this fall.

Velamuri, who also works full-time as a physician, and founded Luminare in September 2014 with the goal of preventing people from dying of sepsis. The company’s software platform optimizes nursing workflow, accelerates access to care and streamlines medical communication, he said.

“Fundraising has been time-consuming, elaborate and a learning process. Easy is not a term that applies to fundraising,” Velamuri said.

Harvey, Velamuri, his wife, and three kids are currently sleeping in a friend’s guest room.

“I thought my life was busy and complicated before the flood,” he told Crunchbase News. “Now every day requires a more detailed plan. Sometimes stuff gets done in the middle of the night.”

From the VC side, oil and gas continues to be a hot sector – despite the lower oil prices globally.

, managing partner at Houston-based , noted that his firm invests strictly in companies providing digital solutions to the oil and gas industry.

“The third quarter was the hottest time yet that we saw in the digital oilfield space, and we expect the fourth quarter to be even more active,” he said. His firm closed two financings during the quarter. Ironically, neither deal involved a Houston startup. One investment was in a Canadian firm and the other in an Austin-based startup.

Harvey impacted the entire oil & gas space, Arendt noted, and put the industry back by two to three weeks.

“Venture-backed companies were not immune,” he said. “But it has already recovered and is back in full swing.”

The third quarter was by far and away one of the worst for the Texas venture scene in recent times. Despite optimism on the part of local venture capitalists, the state appears to be struggling to gain the momentum it needs to emerge as a shining star in the startup world.

Those are two standout trends for the venture investment landscape in the domestic third quarter of 2017, according to reported and projected data from Crunchbase. Data shows a rise in late-stage funding and a stabilizing early-stage funding environment. Acquisitions and IPO activity, by comparison, were lackluster.

Read The Global Q3 2017 Venture Capital Report Here

At the late stage, U.S. venture investment hit its highest level in five quarters by both round count and total dollars invested. Total investment at the early stage was also at the highest point in the past year. Meanwhile, round counts were down from a year ago but fairly stable quarter-over-quarter.

Bottom line: There was a lot of money going into the ecosystem. That’s left some VCs worried about exits.

“There’s just so much money going into these late-stage rounds that the public markets can’t take them all and acquirers can’t acquire them all,” said , a partner at , which invests at early through late-stage rounds.

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On the one hand, Eggers noted that a plentiful supply of late-stage capital can help companies by providing more runway to scale and achieve the earnings metrics that buyers and public market investors seek. But it also makes it easier to put off an IPO or acquisition, which means venture fund investors have to wait longer for returns.

For Q3 2017, massive capital influxes from the Vision Fund at early through growth-stage rounds played a considerable role in pushing up funding totals. Even without SoftBank, however, many of the trends visible in recent quarters continued, including the minting of new unicorns and rising investment in hot sectors like AI and transportation.

Below, we look at some of the key data points for the quarter, including early and late-stage funding, M&A, and IPOs.

Early Stage Stabilizes

Fewer U.S. seed and early-stage companies are closing funding rounds in 2017 compared to a year ago. However, the decline in round counts appears to have stabilized.

U.S. startups are expected to close just over 2,000 seed and early stage rounds in Q3, according to projected funding totals from CrunchBase. That is on par with Q2 of 2017, but still well below Q3 of 2016, which had just shy of 2,500 seed and early-stage investments.

Early Stage

Early stage (Series A and B) funding is projected to total $8.26 billion in Q3 2017. That’s up from $7.91 billion that U.S. early-stage startups raised in Q2 2017 and from the $7.47 billion that they raised in Q3 2016.

A few exceptionally large Series A and B rounds helped boost the funding totals. By far the largest such round for Q3 2017 was a , a Silicon Valley-based developer of indoor farms. Other big round recipients include , developer of camera technology for autonomous vehicles, and , a fintech startup that partners with online retailers to extend pay-over-time offers to customers.

Below is a list of some of the largest early stage rounds:

Seed Stage

U.S. startups are projected to raise $892 million in seed and angel investments Q3 2017. That’s down from the $995 million they were projected to collect in Q2 2017 and the $1 billion raised in Q3 2016.

Projected seed-stage round counts are down as well, with just under 1,200 companies expected to raise funding in Q3 2017, down from just over 1,200 in Q2 2017 and well below Q3 2016, which had just over 1,500 seed and angel fundings.

Below, we highlight several of the more significant seed-stage financings for the just-ended quarter:

Late Stage Gains

Late-stage investment was particularly strong in Q3 2017, with 225 funding rounds, the highest quarterly total in more than a year. Altogether, U.S. companies raised $11.6 billion in late stage capital (Series C and later), up from $11 billion in Q2 2017 and $9.5 billion in Q3 2016.

The largest late stage funding rounds went to a variety of sectors, including transportation, medical devices, and online services. , a developer of electric scooters and battery swapping infrastructure, secured one of the largest financings, closing on $300 million in a Temasek-backed round.  Other big funding recipients include , a developer of robotics technology for ophthalmic surgery, and , a ridesharing app. See a list of large late-stage rounds below:

Total Funding And The Softbank Effect

Overall, venture funding for Q3 of 2017 totaled $21.75 billion, according to Crunchbase projections. That’s up slightly from Q2 of 2017 and from Q3 of 2016, and marks the highest total in the past five quarters. The quarterly totals also include several investment rounds involving mature startups that are classified as technology growth rounds.

A discussion of big third quarter investments would be remiss without a mention of SoftBank. The firm’s $93 billion SoftBank Vision Fund is the largest-venture corporate venture investment vehicle ever – and it was a forceful presence in Q3, backing many of the quarter’s largest rounds.

Softbank was especially active in late-stage and growth-stage dealmaking, as a sole or lead investor in over $6.4 billion worth of rounds for U.S. companies, including a massive $4.4 billion growth financing for coworking giant .

Just how to classify SoftBank-backed rounds was a matter some internal debate at CrunchBase News. The firm’s investments, in some cases, hew closer to growth equity than venture capital. In the final analysis, we included some of SoftBank’s investments, including earlier-stage rounds and deals in which it co-invested with other VCs in the quarterly totals, while excluding others, such as the WeWork investment, which was deemed to better fit the parameters of a private equity investment.

Exits

The pace of U.S. venture-backed exits was relatively slow in the just-ended quarter, with a handful of IPOs and no multi-billion dollar acquisitions.

Acquisitions

It was the second quarter in a row without a multi-billion-dollar acquisition of a venture-backed company. The last deal of that magnitude was back in January when . That said, corporate acquirers did make a few big Q3 purchases, snapping up VC-funded companies in sectors ranging from medical devices to enterprise software to beverages.

Potentially the largest disclosed acquisition was Teleflex’s purchase of NeoTract, a developer of surgical devices for urological and gynecological disorders, for $725 million up front and up to $375 million in milestone payments. Silicon Valley-based had previously raised about $175 million in venture funding. Other VC-funded companies that sold for sums in hundreds of millions this past quarter include healthcare revenue software provider , coffee purveyor , agricultural robotics startup , and enterprise software companies and . See the chart below for details:

IPOs

On the IPO front, the just-ended quarter was also fairly ho-hum. Crunchbase News counted six offerings from U.S. venture-backed companies, including four med-tech IPOs and two Internet or tech deals.

The last VC-backed IPO of the quarter – for streaming media device maker Roku – was also the largest. The Los Gatos, Calif.-based company raised $220 million in its offering last week, with shares prices surging more than 80 percent in the following trading days. The next-biggest offering came from Redfin, a tech-enabled real estate brokerage that raised $138 million in its July debut, with shares up about 66 percent from the offering price in recent trading.

About two-thirds of VC-backed IPOs for Q3 2017 were from life science companies. Of these, cancer drug developer was the largest offering, raising $128 million in its late September debut. Two other drug developers, and , also made their debuts in Q3, along with diagnostics startup .

The combination of continued high late-stage funding activity and slow exits leads Eggers and others in the industry to raise concerns about an eventual shakeout.

That said, there are indications of some pickup in exit activity ahead, though it may take time. Most notably, the board of Uber, the most highly valued U.S. startup, set a goal to take the company public by 2019. If Uber manages to sustain or exceed its current valuation of around $70 billion, that could go a long way toward delivering venture investors some much-awaited returns.

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In the 18 months since that report, Silicon Valley has witnessed unprecedented turmoil following a string of public disclosures on sexism, pay discrimination and sexual harassment of women. In response, many investing firms as well as startups have taken steps to improve behavior as well as the diversity of their work forces.

As 2017 draws to a close, Crunchbase decided to re-apply the methodology from the 2016 report to see what progress, if any, might be measurable. What follows are the somewhat encouraging results from that updated analysis as well as a detailed analysis of the firms that are making the biggest impact on the women in venture equation.

Here are some of the most notable takeaways:

• Among the top 100 venture firms, the percentage of women partners edged up to 8 percent from 7 percent, an increase of 17 percent.
• Eight firms in the top 100 added a female partner for the first time.
• Women now hold 15 percent of the partner roles at accelerators and corporate venture firms, a 25 percent improvement in 18 months.
• Women founded 16 micro-venture funds in the last three years, 21 percent of all the new firms in that category.
• 10 percent of venture dollars globally between 2012 and Q3 2017 went to startups with at least one woman founder.
• 16 percent of seed dollars globally between 2012 and Q3 2017 went to startups with at least one woman founder.

Methodology

For Crunchbase’s second Women in Venture Report, the Crunchbase analytics team followed the same line of analysis as the original report.

First, we set out to determine how many women are investing partners at the 100 top venture and micro-venture firms. Second, we examined which venture and micro-venture firms have the strongest track record of supporting startups with at least one female co-founder.

To answer the first question, we began by revisiting our list of the top 100 venture firms globally.¹ We reviewed our top 100 list to make sure we represented the more active firms in recent years  who are leading early-stage venture rounds. As a result of this analysis twenty one new firms joined the top 100 firms for this report.² The majority of these firms operate outside of the U.S., which is in line with the growth of venture activity we are seeing in both Europe and Asia.

Next, we looked at all the men and women listed as “partners” at those firms, and screened that list to ensure they were true “full time investing partners,” which, in our definition, means the authority to invest the partnership’s funds. We excluded many employees who have a “partner” title but do not invest. We excluded roles that were senior but not on the investing side, including CFO, COO, General Counsel and limited partner management. We also excluded other operational roles for talent, scaling, and marketing support for portfolio companies.

Key Findings

Once we carefully reviewed the data for the top 100 venture firms, we found that 8 percent of the partners, or 64 of 752, are women. That marks a 17 percent improvement over the 54 female investing partners we reported in April 2016, which is clear if very mild progress. 58 of the venture firms in our updated list have no female partners, which is a bit of an improvement over 62 firms 18 months ago.

8 percent of partners at top 100 venture firms are women, a 17 percent improvement from 18 months ago.

We also looked at which firms have the most female venture partners. At the top of the 42 firms stands NEA (6), Qiming Venture Partners (4) and GSR Ventures (4), both based in China, Canaan Partners (4), and Social Capital (4). A further five firms have two investing partners, and thirty-two firms have a single female investing partner.

The firms that have brought on a female partner for the first time since our last report include Atomico, Benchmark, Bessemer Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lux Capital, Northzone, Sequoia Capital for their US team, and Versant Ventures.

When we looked at the male/female ratio among investing partners at the top 100, topped the list with 50 percent female partners out of four partners. A further 6 of the 100 top firms have 30 percent or more female partners including , , , , , and . Two of these seven firms, Horizons Ventures, and Scale Venture Partners, were founded by women.Three of the seven firms with the highest percentage of female partners are based in Hong Kong or China.

Below are charts that rank the top 100 firms according to the number of female partners and the percentage of partners who are women.

As a check on our top 100 firm data, we also looked at a comprehensive list of global venture and micro-venture firms, including all those in Crunchbase that have been active in 2017. When we applied our “investing partner” criteria to those 658 firms, we discovered that 9 percent of partners are women, up from 8 percent 18 months ago. That outcome suggests that the pattern at the top firms is representative across the industry.

While improvements at that rate may not seem glacial, there are signs of faster change in interesting subsets of the venture world. New firms, for example, have far greater female partner representation. In the last three years, according to Crunchbase data, 21 percent of newly launched venture and micro-venture firms,16 firms in all, had at least one female founder. That is nearly 3x the rate in the top 100 firms. The trend is especially pronounced among micro venture firms, many started by notable female VCs, including   at Cowboy Ventures, at the Perkins Fund, , and at Aspect Ventures, who left established venture firms to start their own firms. These female founding partners in turn are clearly more inclined to hire female partners down the line. At the 63 active firms with at least one female co-founder, on average 44 percent of the investing partners are women.

Investing Firms Founded By Women

We also revisited the data in the corporate venture scene. The 40 corporate venture arms and 87 accelerators active in 2017 showed significant gains for women partners. Women hold 15 percent of the partner roles at both accelerators and corporate venture firms, a 25 percent increase over the 12 percent in our 2016 report.

Women now hold 15 percent of the partner roles at both accelerators and corporate venture firms, a 25 percent improvement in 18 months.

Finally, we also reviewed female employment broadly speaking at the 459 firms in Crunchbase that have substantial teams and are active. Women now hold down 25 percent of the roles on the investment team at the associate, vice president and principal levels up from 22 percent in 2016. The increase in women at the more junior roles on investing teams bodes well for the industry moving forward.

Do Women Investors Invest In Female Founders?

From our most recent analysis, Crunchbase reported the percentage of funded startups with at least one female founder increased from 9 percent to 17 percent between 2009 and 2017.³ We previously concluded that female founders are gradually doing better when it comes to funding. That data also opened a number of related questions. For example, are some venture firms more likely to fund female entrepreneurs than others?

And related to that question, does the presence of female investing partners in a venture firm increase the likelihood of an investment in a female founder? As Crunchbase has a strong data set for female founders, as well as investing partners, answers to these questions are within reach.

Investing In Female-Founded Startups

Between 2012 and Q3 2017, 10 percent of venture dollars globally, a total of $45.9 billion, went to startups with at least one female founder. This represented 4,600 funding rounds or 13 percent of all venture funding rounds with founders listed in Crunchbase.

Venture Funding Rounds in Female-Founded Startups

During the same time period, 16 percent of seed/angel funds globally, a total of $3.9 billion in funds, reported at least one female founder. This represents 7,300 rounds or 18 percent of all seed rounds with founders.

Seed Funding Rounds in Female-Founded Startups

These numbers establish important guidelines for future analysis, as well as help us understand which firms are more inclined to fund female entrepreneurs.

Venture Investments In Female-Led startups

To get a closer look at venture firms investing in female founders, we compiled a list of firms with investments in at least 50 companies made between 2012 and Q3 2017 to determine which firms over-indexed against the top 100’s 13 percent in venture rounds made to female founders. (We only looked at firms where we could identify at least 75 percent of the founders for the firm’s portfolio.)

At the top of the list are two firms with female venture partner founders, at Forerunner Ventures (43 percent in 22 companies) and at Kapor Capital (37 percent in 37 companies). Other firms that over-indexed include Sherpa Capital 27 percent (23), Upfront Ventures 24 percent (20) portfolio companies, Thrive Capital at 24 percent (17), Lux Capital at 24 percent (15), Maveron at 22 percent (16) Zhenfund at 22 percent (18), Canaan Partners 21 percent (24) and Lerer Hippeau Ventures at 20 percent (35). Of these eight firms, five have have female investing partners, including Lux Capital, Upfront Ventures, Maveron, Canaan Partners, and Zhenfund.

The top six firms with the highest count of female founded companies in descending order are New Enterprise Associates with 63 portfolio companies, Sequoia Capital with 44 companies, Index Ventures with 41 companies, Accel Partners 41 companies, Kapor Capital and GV with 37 companies. Of these six firms, four have full time female investing partners, namely New Enterprise Associates, Sequoia Capital, Accel partners and Kapor Capital.

While those numbers might suggest some correlation between the presence of a female venture and more investments in female sounders, in the larger data picture there is no clear correlation quite yet. There is no difference on average in the number of rounds an all male firm provide to female founder versus teams with women partners. There is clear evidence, however, that the small number of venture firms with female founders and/or an unusually high percentage of female partners, invest at elevated levels in female entrepreneurs.

The charts below rank the who’s who of investing in female founders by percentage and by round. By our definition, we count any company that lists at least one female as a co-founder as female-founded.

Venture Investments In Female-Led Startups

Seed Investments In Female-Led Startups

We ran the same analysis on seed investors, where, as we noted above, some 18 percent of all rounds in Crunchbase went to firms with female founders. We looked at firms that closed at least 60 rounds between 2012 and Q3 2017 in companies whose founders we were able to identify in Crunchbase in at least 75 percent of cases.

Firms that index over 30 percent include Vegas-based VTF Capital at 38 percent (45 portfolio companies), SOSV at 37 percent (174), Sydney based Artesian VC at 34 percent (28), and New York based Collaborative Fund at 32 percent (24). Firms that index over 25 percent include Slow Ventures at 29 percent (49), Rock Health at 29 percent (18), Entrepreneurs Round Table at 28 percent (32), Marc Bell Ventures at 27 percent (36), Great Oaks Venture Partners at 26 percent (50), LaunchCapital at 25 percent (23), Wayra at 25 percent (74), and Right Side Capital Management at 25 percent (49). The majority of these active seed investors do not have female investing partners as noted in the chart below.

Firms with the highest count include 500 Startups with 254 companies, Y Combinator with 187, SOSV with 174, Startup Chile with 94, Wayra with 74, and StartupBootcamp with 54.

Two of the three highest in terms of percentage of total rounds in startups with a female founder —  Artesian VC and Collaborative Fund — have female partners. On the other hand, the five most active seed investors by round  — 500 Startups, Y Combinator, Startup Chile, Wayra, and StartupBootcamp — each have at least one female investing partner.

The charts below rank top seed firms’ investments, by percentage and round, in startups with a female founder. The firms listed made 60 or more investments between 2012 and Q3 2017.

In sum, the data suggests some mildly good news about the increasing number of women in the ranks of venture partnerships and a strong sense that new foundations, namely the rise of women starting venture firms, will accelerate that trend in the years to come.

Illustration: . Thank you to who created the Tableau charts for this report.

This report was launched on October 4th at the in Orlando, Florida.

Footnotes

1. To benchmark the top 100 firms we reviewed the following activity; fund size, investment cadence in the last 5 years, count of leading early stage A & B rounds, and active in 2017.
2. Twenty one new firms joined the top 100 firms for this report. They include 406 Ventures, 8VC,  Alven Capital, Atomico, Creandum, F-Prime Capital Partners, Global Founders Fund, GSR Ventures, High-Tech Gruenderfonds, Horizons Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners, Kalaari Capital, Legend Capital, Magma Venture Partners, Northern Light Venture Capital, Notion Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Seventure Partners, Shunwei Capital, and Zhenfund.The following firms came off the list, based on the following factors. Firms were either not investing at the same pace in 2017, or not leading early stage rounds. These firms include Atlas Venture, Avalon Ventures, Azure Capital Partners, BlueRun Ventures, Correlation Ventures, Dag Ventures, Domain Associates, ff Venture Capital, Flagship Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, Formation 8, iNovia Capital, InterWest Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Octopus Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, SV Angel, Technology Crossover Ventures, Ventech, and Wellington Partners.
3. For companies with at least one female founder, one-third are made up of teams that have only female founders. Another one-third are teams with two co-founders that include one male and one female. The last third represent teams which have 3+ co-founders with at least one female founder. Two-thirds of these startups, therefore, represent majority or equal female and male-founder representation.

This story was updated on Oct 4, 2017, to reflect that we miscounted Canaan’s female investing partners. The correct count is four not the three we originally reported.
SOSV was added to the seed investment charts on Oct 17, 2017.

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In this report from Crunchbase News, we assess the condition of the global venture capital ecosystem supported by data and projections from Crunchbase. We divide our analysis of the market into two parts: money in and money out.

In the Money In section, we cover reported and projected data measuring how – and how much– the global venture capital ecosystem invested in Q3 2017. In this section, we’ll see how this quarter stacks up against the previous quarter and the same time period last year.

In the Money Out section, we’ll review statistics on known venture-backed acquisitions and other noteworthy liquidity events, including a look at the market for technology IPOs.

At the top of each section, we provide bullish and bearish findings in bullet-point form. Let’s get into it!

Money In

• Bullish Key Finding. According to Crunchbase’s projections, both deal and dollar volume are at record highs since the Dot-Com bubble. Q3 2017 surpasses previous highs reached in Q1 2016, a quarter that was followed by a number of sequential down quarters.
• Bearish Key Finding. Despite significant growth in nearly all metrics connected to early and late-stage growth, the market for seed and angel deals may be showing signs of stagnation. Projected dollar volumes and reported mean and median deal sizes have remained flat since Q2.

An Overview of The Venture Capital Landscape

Q3 2017 is the fourth consecutive quarter of growth in both deal and dollar volume for venture capital investment around the world. At this point, it’s safe to say that global venture capital has achieved escape velocity from the 2016 slump.

Many of the sources of uncertainty from 2016 have been resolved. Last year, global financial markets were in turmoil due to fears of Chinese stagnation and the Euro crisis. Now, public stock market indices – especially those tracking technology companies – are at or near all-time highs. Additionally, measures of , , , and stock market volatility were below their two- and five-year averages for the duration of Q3 2017.

2016 was rife with political uncertainty as populist movements emerged in the US, UK, and elsewhere. But now a Trump presidency in the US and UK’s planned “Brexit” are simply facts global financial markets must contend with, even as both countries – once-stable stalwarts of the global economic and geopolitical order – emerge as a source of uncertainty and risk on economic, trade, and other key regulatory policies.

The relatively calm global economy has given investors on the deeper end of the risk pool – venture investors chief among them – the opportunity to keep “up and to the right.” In doing so, at least according to Crunchbase’s projections, VC has entered waters untraveled since the 1990s.

Global Funding Activity: A View From Cruising Altitude

To paint a picture of the state of the global venture capital market, we’re going to examine both the quantity and size of venture capital deals. In this section, we’re keeping the scope of our analysis fairly abstract. Consider this an executive summary of what’s to come when we dig deeper into the funding statistics on a stage-by-stage basis.

Pace Of Dealmaking

In isolation, the number of deals struck in a particular quarter doesn’t tell us much. However, by looking at this quarter in relation to the previous four, we’re able to assess trends in the overall appetite for venture capital deal-making around the world.

Below, you’ll find a chart displaying the count of venture capital rounds between Q3 2016 and the end of Q3 2017. (For more information on Crunchbase’s projections and methodology, see the end of this report.)

And here is the same data, this time with individual data points rendered on a line chart.

Overall, Crunchbase projects the total number of venture funding rounds grew by 7.8 percent from the second quarter of 2017. This increase in total round count was primarily driven by a growing number of seed and early-stage rounds. As mentioned earlier, the continued growth in round counts marks the fourth straight quarter of deal volume growth. But, more significantly, the 6,146 projected rounds from the third quarter mark a local maximum in the pace of venture capital deal-making around the world since 2000.

On a year-over-year basis, the number of funding rounds at all stages grew by a projected 8.4 percent from Q3 2016’s levels of deal-making activity. Most of this increase can be attributed to consistent, incremental growth in both seed and early-stage deals.

Projected VC Dollar Volume

If the project number of deals has approached record highs was merely noteworthy, the total dollar volume of those venture capital deals is downright remarkable. Crunchbase’s projections indicate that Q3 2017 was a high point for VC dollar volume since the 1990s tech bubble, with the biggest gains coming from early and late-stage venture capital deals.

And, just like before, we’ve laid out the dollar volume data on a line chart.

Quarter-over-quarter, total dollar volume grew by 31.5 percent, the largest quarterly percentage gain in the six quarters since Q1 2016. With approximately $14.4 billion more invested in this quarter relative to last, Q3 2017 now holds the distinction of having the largest total dollar volume jump since Crunchbase began projecting this type of data. In this case, the growth in late-stage dollar volume was the primary influence on the rise of global VC dollar volume.

Compared to the same time last year, total VC dollar volume grew by roughly 50 percent in Q3 2017. The projected $60.17 billion invested in Q3 2017 is 71.3 percent larger than the dollar volume totals for Q4 2016 – a local minimum in venture funding – and 21.5 percent larger than the previous post-Dot Com high of $49.53 billion in the second quarter of 2016.

Most Active Lead Investors

Now that we have a decent understanding of the contours of Q3’s venture market, let’s see who are its most active players overall. Here, we analyzed data for just under 3,500 venture capital deals struck around the world in the third quarter of 2017 in order to identify the investors which led the most rounds. The data we analyzed was extracted from Crunchbase, which typically distinguishes lead investors from those just participating in a given round. In this dataset, we were able to identify 1,554 investors who led rounds out of 2,191 unique investors in the pool.

In the chart below, you can find a rank-ordered list of the most active lead investors, globally, for all venture round types in Q3 2017. Note that this ranking is based on reported data currently in Crunchbase, so these rankings and numbers may shift as additional deal data from Q3 comes in.

In general, we’re seeing more investors lead more deals, especially at the top of the ranks. For example, last quarter we reported that led just nine rounds, despite tying for fourth place with in the rankings. This quarter, NEA led a whopping fifteen rounds according to current Crunchbase data. This tendency to lead more rounds is also evident in , which at the time of writing our Q2 report had led fourteen rounds and ranked in second place at the time.

There are a few new additions to this list, including a couple of international investors. is an active Shanghai-based firm which, in Q3 2017, has led a number of large early-stage and late-stage rounds, including – a company developing autonomous vehicles for ride-sharing – that also saw participation from and . Qiming Venture Partners also led to fund the company’s continued development of cancer-fighting immunotherapy drugs. Drug-maker , life sciences investor , and more traditional VCs like , Sequoia Capital, and also participated in that round.

Turning to another firm on the list, is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Stockholm which invests throughout Europe. Some of the rounds it led in Q3 2017 include , an educational gaming platform developer based in Oslo, and , a hiring platform for shift workers in the hospitality industry.

Although in a ranking like this there’s always some flux from quarter to quarter, in general the list of top round-leading VCs is comprised of the firms we’d expect to see here. In other words: no major surprises.

Now that we’ve surveyed the funding landscape from “cruising altitude,” it’s time to get into the weeds by looking at global venture funding on a stage-by-stage basis.

Stage-By-Stage Analysis Of Q3 2017 VC Funding Trends

The following charts show the average and median size of reported venture deals at different stages of the funding cycle. They serve as helpful points of comparison when looking at rounds during this and future quarters.

Because there’s no better place to start than at the beginning, we’ll kick off the round-by-round analysis with seed and angel funding and move forward from there.

Angel And Seed-Stage Deals

Let’s be clear: angel and seed-stage companies don’t tend to raise a lot of money in these first rounds of outside financing. This holds for the asset class as a whole. Although seed and angel-stage rounds accounted for over 62 percent of the rounds from Q3 2017, they amounted to around 3.6 percent of the total dollar volume last quarter, according to Crunchbase’s projections.

Below, you can find a chart displaying the deal and dollar volume for investment rounds involving these fledgling companies.

On a quarterly basis, deal volume is projected to be up but dollar volume was very slightly down. The number of deals grew by a 9.74 percent since last quarter, but dollar volume declined by roughly 0.3 percent. This means that there was one fewer seed or angel deal struck in Q3 than in Q2 2017, according to Crunchbase projections. Looking now at seed and angel deals on an annual basis, a similar pattern emerges, although with more striking changes. The number of seed and angel deals increased by 8.77 percent since the same time last year, but total dollar volume is markedly lower. Globally, seed and angel-stage companies raised $380 million less in Q3 2017 than they did in Q3 2016, a decline of just over fifteen percent.

But capital and deal-flows are only part of the story. The chart below shows the growth (or lack thereof, as the case may be) in both average and median round sizes for seed and angel deals, based on known deals of this type in Crunchbase. It’s important to note that the chart below – and, indeed, all of the following charts which display average and median round sizes – are based on “reported” or known data in Crunchbase for Q3. These are not based on projected data, like charts displaying projected round counts and dollar volume. (For more about methodology, check out the note at the end of this report.)

Last quarter, we said that “It’s clear that the size of seed and angel rounds is on the rise.” This quarter, yeah, not so much. Relative to last quarter, both average and median round sizes are flat. However, there’s been some growth relative to last year. The average round grew by ten percent and the median round grew by 25 percent. Taken together with dollar volume stabilization over time, it’s possible that the market for seed and angel deals is either about to enter, if it isn’t already in, a period of stagnation.

Let’s now take a look at the investors which have been most involved in the most seed and angel deals in Q3.

As we’ve seen over the past several quarterly reports, accelerator programs rank at the top of the list of active seed-stage investors. These programs often operate on a seasonal schedule, with summer being a popular time. Last quarter, reportedly invested in at least 112 companies in its summer 2017 batch, and invested in at least 19 companies this quarter. (Crunchbase has compiled lists of participating companies for both and ’ summer batches.) Again, like with the ranking of lead investors, please keep in mind that this and subsequent rankings of investors are likely to change as new data is added to Crunchbase over time.

Moving right along, the following table lists a number of notable seed and angel deals from around the world that closed in Q3.

Early-Stage Deals

The early-stage projections are where things start to get more interesting. Comprised mostly of Series A and Series B deals, the dollar amounts are larger than seed and angel rounds and most of the investors are institutional players of some sort. Here, we’ll get a better idea of the overall state of the global venture market because early-stage deals accounted for almost exactly thirty percent of deals and around 38.5 percent of the dollar volume in Q3 2017.

Below, you can find a chart showing projected deal and dollar volume for Q3 2017 and the four preceding quarters.

Unlike seed and angel-stage investments, both deal and dollar volume grew significantly over the past quarter for early-stage companies. Crunchbase projects that there were 79 more early-stage deals in the third quarter compared to the second, corresponding to a roughly 4.5 percent increase.

But it’s dollar volume that has really ballooned. With a projected $6.37 billion in additional capital invested since last quarter, dollar volume is up close to 38 percent. On an annual basis, although the number of deals increased by a comparatively tepid 4.2 percent, total dollar volume grew by 49 percent in the intervening 12 months.

And, finally, it’s worth noting that projected dollar volume for Q3 2017 is almost twice that of Q1 2016, which was the “bottom” of the VC market’s dip from last year.

Let’s now take a look at how round sizes have shifted over time.

Both median and mean round sizes are up on a sequential basis, each growing by 26.7 percent and 16.7 percent, respectively. On a year-over-year basis, again both measures are up. Compared to last year, the average early-stage round is now $4.6 million larger, corresponding to a year-over-year change of 43.4 percent. Median round sizes are also larger, this time by just $2 million, but that works out to be roughly the same proportional change at 40 percent larger. Our suggestion from last quarter’s report – that “by the end of this quarter, these metrics will be back to where they were before the dip of late 2016” – was prescient because mean and median round sizes for early-stage deals are now at a local high according to Crunchbase’s data.

These metrics point to the sentiment of thousands of individual investors around the world, and some of them are more active than others. We’ve identified the most active early-stage investors in Q3 2017 and charted them below.

Here we see many of the usual suspects. This list is mostly comprised of well-capitalized and well-known firms. There are also some newcomers to the top ranks here, including , , , and .

And here are some of the early-stage deals that caught our eye from Q3.

Late-Stage Deals

Much like early-stage deals, investment activity in late-stage rounds gives us a fairly good barometer of the venture capital market. Consisting mostly of Series C, Series D, and other rounds further down the alphabet, this stage represents a small but mighty portion of the market.

Although the projected 448 deals struck in Q3 account for around 7.3 percent of the total deal volume for Q3, they collectively represent an impressive 57 percent of the total dollar volume. As a percentage of total venture funding projected by Crunchbase, this is a local maximum for late-stage’s proportional share of the total funding pie, and it points to the growing dominance of late-stage companies and investors in global funding ecosystem.

Below, you can find a chart displaying the projected deal and dollar volume for late-stage deals for Q3 and the prior year.

It’s been a remarkable quarter, and year, for late-stage deal-making. According to Crunchbase projections, late-stage investors deployed over $9 billion more in Q3, compared to the previous quarter, which corresponds to a 35 percent increase. Compared to last year, total capital inflows into late-stage deals grew by 73 percent. On the deal side, the numbers are more modest. Crunchbase projects that deal volume grew by a little over 14 percent since Q2 2017, and, on an annual basis, late-stage deal volume grew by about 29 percent.

Let’s take a look at the averages.

On a quarterly basis, average deal size grew by just under 20 percent from $67.3 million to $80.7 million, and median round size broke a year-long trend of flatlining to rise 16.7 percent to $35 million. Annually, the growth in median round size would be the same (again, due to the flat line at $30 million since Q3 2016) but the average late-stage round grew by $18.1 million – over 35 percent – since the same time last year.

Let’s take a look at the investors.

Running the risk of sounding like a broken record, this list includes many of “the usual suspects.” There are some big VC funds, a couple of private equity firms that dabble in late-stage VC, a big ol’ investment bank (), and a few corporate venture capital firms.

But this quarter, all eyes have been on , the titanic Japanese mobile phone carrier and holding company for a veritable cornucopia of other businesses, the latest being a $100 billion pool of money SoftBank’s CEO has dubbed “The Vision Fund.” In August, Crunchbase News wrote about this giant pool of money and concluded that the Vision Fund is in a league all its own.

To say that SoftBank has “dominated” late-stage financing in Q3 is an understatement. The company has made over a dozen deals this quarter (including a number of PE rounds that didn’t get counted as “late stage”), and with only a few exceptions, those deals were nine figures or larger. Here are a few highlights:

• SoftBank was the sole investor in in August, and also invested . Previously in 2017, SoftBank has invested $2 billion into WeWork in and bought a further .
• In the ride-sharing and automotive space alone, round, and (which we highlighted in the early-stage section). This leaves out SoftBank is leading with , and to invest up to $10 billion in Uber.
• SoftBank was the sole investor in and was the sole buyer of about , both announced in August.
• SoftBank led .
• SoftBank led with participation from none other than the National Football League and Major League Baseball.

That’s just Q3 2017, and that’s not all of the deals either. The really is something to behold. With a plan to invest its $100 billion over the next five years, SoftBank has the potential to profoundly alter the late-stage investing landscape for the next half-decade.

And here are some of the late-stage rounds that got our attention this quarter, at least two of which were led by SoftBank.

Finally, The Vision Fund has broken the mold in more ways than one. It rendered one of Crunchbase’s stage categorizations rather useless.

Readers of the 2016 Annual report, or the Quarterly reports from Q1 and Q2 will remember the “Technology Growth” category, which ordinarily captures “private equity investments with participation from venture investors.” Well, SoftBank is technically a venture investor (because it’s labeled as a “corporate venture capital” firm in Crunchbase’s investing data) and it has invested in a number of private equity deals. But not all of those have been captured in the Technology Growth numbers for either this Global report or the subsequent US report because SoftBank is often the sole investor in these rounds, a leader rather than a mere participant.

For the record, this is what Crunchbase’s projections indicated what deal and dollar volume for Q3 would be.

Considering that SoftBank led several PE rounds that are integer multiples of the $640 million grand total of projected Technology Growth funding, we’re thinking it’s time we take that metric out to pasture.

Money Out

• Bullish Key Finding. Venture-backed M&A dollar volume is up significantly from Q2 despite a slow and steady decline in the number of venture-backed M&A deals. This suggests there may be other liquidity and investment opportunities for companies which raised from VCs.
• Bearish Key Finding. There is some consolidation in increasingly competitive industries, and in markets where business models and product-market fit were difficult to find.

Venture-Backed Acquisitions

In the world of VC and other private market equity finance, there are plenty of ways to invest money in exchange for an equity stake in a venture; however, there’s a comparatively small set of ways for getting that money out. One of the primary ways – if not the primary way – this occurs is through acquisitions.

Below, you’ll find a chart plotting data for venture-backed acquisitions in Crunchbase.

Don’t let this chart fool you: Q3 2017 was by no means a bad quarter for venture-backed exits. It’s just that, at least as far as dollar volume is concerned, the middle of 2016 was exceptionally good. This being said, there are some trends in the market worth pointing out.

Dollar volume may not be the all-important indicator of M&A market health, even if it is the most eye-catching figure most of the time. The size of individual deals has a lot of variance, and that variance is reflected as “noise” or “jumpiness” in the bar chart above. Since the last quarter, there’s been a roughly 367 percent increase in dollar volume for known venture-backed startup M&A; however, compared to Q3 last year, total dollar volume is 25.7 percent lower.

The more important number is the volume of deals, which has been on a slow and steady downtrend since 2016. Since the last quarter, the number of venture-backed exits has declined by a modest 1.6 percent, but since last year venture-backed M&A deal volume has declined by over 25 percent.

A decline in M&A activity isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, there are plenty of good reasons for venture-backed startups to not sell. If companies are able to raise growth capital from an increasingly robust late-stage funding market and market opportunities continue to present themselves, pulling the ripcord and selling becomes less appealing. And that may be the dynamic at play here. Despite this, a decline in exit opportunities is still something for founders and investors alike to be mindful of.

Of course, there were many, many M&A deals in Q3, both for companies that previously received venture funding and those which have not. Here are some of the deals from last quarter that got our attention.

Let’s start by saying that we didn’t pick these deals because they were the biggest. We selected them because they are indicative of a few broad trends in the tech ecosystem.

On the more high-tech end of the market, two deals point to broader issues in the flash storage market. The still-pending deal led by Bain Capital to and are a reflection of a trend toward consolidation in the flash storage industry as demand soars amid constrained supply and shrinking margins. (As an aside, the rising price of flash storage is in part for the new, higher price points for the latest iPhone models, which Crunchbase News covered.)

In medicine, is just the latest indicator that the market for gene-based cancer therapies – especially those tied to CAR-T cell treatments – is continuing to heat up, despite high costs and uncertainty, as Crunchbase News covered.

And finally, if there’s one market that’s been hyped to no end, it’s been artificial intelligence. And with the ascendence of ‘chatbots’ and conversational user experience design, companies have invested a good deal of money in the space. In 2015, , and in September 2016, , both for undisclosed amounts. As far as acquisitions of tools for building conversational user interfaces, 2017 has its own small but growing cohort. Among their ranks is Seattle-based in the opening days of Q3, and Chicagoland-based in late September.

Additionally, there’s been more consolidation in the gig economy. We’ve highlighted two mergers in the grocery and restaurant delivery market above. And in the on-demand services industry, the latest manifestation of this consolidation trend is , one of the original “push a button to make something happen” service providers.

Initial Public Offerings

In Q3 2017, the global IPO market maintained the forward momentum established in Q2 as companies from North America, Europe, Asia and elsewhere took their shares to public markets.

Below, you can find a table with some of the notable IPOs from last quarter.

In Q4, we can look forward to the public debut of MongoDB, which has raised $303.4 million in venture capital from the likes of , , Sequoia Capital, , and . Surely, there are other major tech companies looking to go public, but which companies are in Q4’s IPO pipeline is still somewhat uncertain.

Conclusion

With billions more dollars flowing into the market for shares in startups of all stripes and stages, venture investors around the world currently enjoy a robust bull market, particularly at the later-stage end of the spectrum. Public markets in the US and elsewhere are either at or near all-time highs, a number of successful public debuts brought a once-stalled tech IPO pipeline back from the brink, and new approaches to funding startups flout the stereotype that summer is the slow time of year for the financial sector.

This being said, what goes up will eventually come down. Investors would do well to keep in mind the mythical story of , the would-be escapee from the island of Crete. In Greek myth, Icarus’s father, Daedelus, a master craftsman, made for his son a pair of wings comprised of feathers and wax. Cautioned not to fly too low, nor too high, Icarus ignored his father’s warnings in an act of now archetypal hubris. We know how the story ends, because he’s the one who flew too close to the sun.

If the global venture capital market continues on its upward trend, so does the risk of meltdowns.

Methodology

The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and in two varieties: projected data and reported data.

Crunchbase uses projections for global and U.S. trend analysis. Projections are based on historical patterns in late reporting, which are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity. Using projected data helps prevent undercounting or reporting skewed trends that only correct over time. All projected values are noted accordingly.

Certain metrics, like mean and median reported round sizes, were generated using only reported data. Unlike with projected data, Crunchbase calculates these kinds of metrics based only on the data it currently has. Just like with projected data, reported data will be properly indicated.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted. Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to US dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs, and other financial events as reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the prevailing spot price at the time of the transaction.

Glossary of Funding Terms

• Seed/angel include financings that are classified as a seed or angel, including accelerator fundings and equity crowdfunding below $5 million.
• Early-stage venture include financings that are classified as a Series A or B, venture rounds without a designated series that are below $15M, and equity crowdfunding above $5 million.
• Late-stage venture include financings that are classified as a Series C+ and venture rounds greater than $15M.
• Technology Growth include private equity investments with participation from venture investors.

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Historically, Silicon Valley has served as the de facto hub for tech. But that is under assault from markets both domestic and abroad. Hotspots in China, India, Latin America, and Europe are showing increasing maturity and growth.

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Which market is a leader or laggard matters.

Happily, the Crunchbase News team is working—as we speak—on our Q3 report. It will detail a host of top-line venture statistics pertinent to our topic. However, for today, I wanted to answer a question: how is the United States faring in terms of its share of global early-stage funding?

As you can see, that metric ties into our comments concerning Silicon Valley’s ascendance.

Directional Notes

I pulled data from our global and US reports, finding the projected dollars amounts for recent quarters.¹ I then calculated the percent of early-stage dollars, of the global whole, that the United States commands.

As you can quickly see below, the percentage is going down:

This is our first time looking at this particular metric, so let’s not worry too much about the absolute percentages. Instead, let’s look at it directionally. In that light, the United States of America has headed one direction: down.

A few things are happening inside the data that are worth explaining.

First, the most-recent-quarter was not a local maximum for U.S. early-stage fundraising. The first quarter shown above, Q3’2016, was more active in terms of dollars.

However, the most-recent-quarter’s global tally is a local maximum, coming in at the highest dollar amount for the quarters charted above. So the declines are not driven by shared directional shifts, of which the world is getting the better cut. Instead, the U.S. is moving independent of the global early-stage market.

At around three-quarters of a billion dollars, we can hazard the U.S. early-stage market is healthy. But the global numbers show rising activity that the U.S. can’t match proportionally on its own.

Will our aggregate global and U.S. reports point in a similar direction? We’ll find out soon enough. But don’t be shocked if there is some alignment.

Back To The Valley

Comparing aggregate U.S. metrics versus world metrics is only so good a proxy for how Silicon Valley is doing against the rest. We may, in the future, doodle out a leading-market quarterly report segment that better answers our initial question.

But we can do some work regardless. That’s because Silicon Valley is a critical player in the broader U.S. startup scene.

Returning to our data, we have a couple of options to work from to determine what Silicon Valley is up to.

1. Silicon Valley is growing in terms of early-stage dollars. This would imply that other U.S.-located markets have shrunk enough to allow Silicon Valley the space to grow independently, and still have the U.S. market down in aggregate compared to global results.
2. Silicon Valley is shrinking in relative dollar-share when compared to the global market. Therefore, the world’s largest tech hub is moving in the same direction as the rest of the United States in early-stage fundraising compared to the global market.

Tapping Occam in for a moment, we can pretty safely point to the second option as the most likely.

So how much does it matter? Only that over time, if Silicon Valley’s funding environment becomes desiccated in comparison to other hubs, its ability to attract the next generation of talent, and therefore startups, could lessen.

And that’s when the positive feedback loop flips.

But don’t worry, Silicon Valley. Momentum of this sort takes a while to change.

1. Crunchbase News uses projected Crunchbase funding totals for its reports; many rounds don’t become known during their effective quarter, especially early-stage rounds, so we project based on historical trends to create more accurate results.

iStockPhoto / Daniil Peshkov