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Q3 Southern California Venture Deals Around $879M

A quick analysis by socalTECH of our tracking of venture capital deals in Southern California finds that there was around $879M in venture funding activity here in Q3. The information--gleaned from funding announcements, regulatory filings, and other sources--are not far off from socalTECH's totals from last quarter, which totaled up around $932M in investment activity. The biggest are for venture activity in the quarter was Biopharmaceuticals, which was $299.13M of the quarterly total.

San Diego led investment activity in Q3, with a large number of the biggest VC deals all located in the area. Intellikine in La Jolla and Zogenix in San Diego both raised $51M in deals; San Diego's NextWave Wireless raised $45.5M, San Dieg's Roka BioScience $37.2M, and Borrego Solar Systems, in El Cajon, raised $30M. Outside San Diego, Coda Automotive, the electric auto firm in Santa MOnica, raised $24.1M; Northridge based Gamma Medica raised $24.0M last week.

In terms of venture firms, the most active firms here for Q3 were Western Technology Investment and the Tech Coast Angels, with 3 deals each; Qualcomm Ventures, Benchmark Capital, Mission Ventures, Venrock, Clearstone Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Enterprise Partners, J&J Development Corporation, and Domain Associates all had two deals each for the quarter in Southern California.

PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association, and VentureOne will release their quarterly nationwide results of venture activity later this month. Numbers from those firms will differ--sometimes drastically--due to sources of information, timing of funding events, and classification of data.