Data for the US venture deals was recently released by the National Venture Capital Association. Parsing through the information can give us interesting information regarding the overall state of venture capital, and what deals shape the market. Reviewing all of this information takes some time, but we can get interesting insights by slicing and dicing the information that exists from the NVCA.
To get an overall picture of the market, and deal distribution, we can take a look at the following histogram of the US venture deals from Q1 2012:
Figure: Chart Showing Distribution of US Venture Deals in terms of Deal Size, Q1 201.
This chart shows a breakdown by deal size of the deals posted in the NVCA survey for the first quarter of 2012 in terms of total deals by percentage. As we might expect, a large number of the overall deals were in the less than $10M range. What is interesting though, is the number of deals greater than $50M. Even more surprising is that there are a not insignificant number of deals >$74M, with the largest deal recorded for the quarter approximately $238M.
The table below contains some of the descriptive statistics for the deals in the chart above:
|
Statistic |
Value |
|
1st Quartile |
$1,000,000 |
|
Median |
$3,000,000 |
|
Mean |
$7,605,000 |
|
3rd Quartile |
$8,000,000 |
|
Max |
$238,000,000 |
Another interesting part regarding the data is that the median is $3M, but the mean is north of $7M, pointing towards significant leverage points on the north side of the median, as indicated by a $238M deals that was the maximum recorded for the quarter.
There are some pretty significant questions and points that even this high level information brings up. One of the first is why there are so many large private deals recorded by institutional venture capital firms, and who is getting the money?