Silicon Valley is still the only relevant market for VCs according to some Valley-based VCs, but we wanted to test this assumption a bit by looking at a cross-section of the most prominent Silicon Valley-based multi-stage venture funds to see if they were making more or less bets on NY.
Anecdotally, the news has been good for NY. Just this week, Sequoia Capital led a $24M investment into NY-based content marketing software firm Percolate. And it’s not the only Sand Hill Road mega fund making big bets in NY. Earlier this month, Andreessen Horowitz recently wrote one of the largest Series A checks over the last two years to cloud computing startup Digital Ocean.
Using CB Insights data, we took a look at five Silicon Valley-based mega venture funds who have been active in NY to see which funds, if any, have been accelerating their deal tallies to NY-based startups. Specifically, we looked at:
- Accel Partners
- Andreessen Horowitz
- Benchmark Capital
- Kleiner Perkins
- Sequoia Capital
The data below.
The Data
The chart below highlights the number of NY-based deals by these five Silicon Valley multi-stage venture firms since 2009. Of the five, Accel has been most active in NY, completing over 40 deals over the period including to Knewton, LearnVest and Etsy. Accel is also the only firm of the five to have opened an NY office.
As shown below, there is no clear trend between the five mega-funds increasing or decreasing their total NY-based deals by year. While Accel has actually done fewer NY-based deals since hitting a five-year high in 2010, Benchmark did its highest number of NY deals in 2013 including to Sailthru and Swifto.
On a share basis, NY has not gained share staying relatively range-bound in the 12-14% range versus California investments by these firms. The chart below highlights the share of California deals vs. NY deals made by the Silicon Valley heavyweights.
