Venture capital is undergoing a lot of changes and with that change, there are a lot of walking dead or Zombie VCs. These are venture capital firms that look “alive” based on their website and even perhaps the occasional investment but which in actuality are likely on their last legs. Zombie VCs or those having a tough time raising their next fund tend to exhibit a few key characteristics which include (1) shrinking to non-existent financing deal activity, (2) little to no new investments – just following on in existing portfolio companies and (3) few to no exits in the last two years.
Unfortunately, understanding and identifying Zombie VCs or more generally, benchmarking investors or identifying the right target acquirers/investors has been difficult as even if you have the data, the effort required to do this is laborious. We recently launched Investor Analytics as a way to make the process of understanding investors and acquirers more intuitive using our data and interactive data visualizations. Beyond identifying Zombie VCs, you can use Investor Analytics to answer each of the questions below in 30 seconds or less:
- Is Sequoia Capital doing more deals in New York or Boston?
- What types of companies is Google acquiring?
- What are all the Series A deals that NEA has done in the last 4 quarters?
- What’s the average number of deals per quarter in which Greylock participates?
- Does First Round Capital co-invest more with SV Angel or Lerer Ventures?
- What portion of Kleiner Perkins recent investments have been financings to New companies vs. Follow-ons to existing portfolio companies?
- How many exits has Accel Partners had in the last year and what is the breakdown of IPOs vs M&A?
Investor Analytics is part of every investor or acquirer profile. When you visit a profile and look in navigation menu to the left, you’ll see the word “Investor Analytics” with 12 pre-set data visualizations available below it which will help you answer questions like those detailed above.
Below, we’ll dive into several of the above questions with examples of how Investor Analytics can provide those answers.
Investment & Acquisitions by Industry, Geography or Stage
If you want to understand if Sequoia is making more investments in Boston or New York or what industries Google’s recent acquisitions have been in or if you want to identify all the Series A investments made by NEA, the heatmaps built into Investor Analytics quickly get you to those answers.
The heatmap below shows Sequoia’s investments between Q4 2010 to Q4 2012 broken down by US state. You could also dive into their investments in Europe, Asia, etc. But what you see in the below heatmap is that they’ve done more deals in New York than Massachusetts. Of course, California (the big dark blue square) remains their favored destination.
If you want to see the actual transactions/deals that make up a particular part of the heatmap, those are all displayed right below the heatmap and with a quick click. You’re never more than one-step removed from underlying transaction detail.
Investment Syndicates – Understanding Relationships
Want to know if First Round is doing more deals with SV Angel or Lerer Ventures? It’s easy to determine with the Investment Syndicate visualization that is part of Investor Analytics. And we’ve embedded the answer below.
To see the actual deals, just click on any bubble and they’ll come up.
Exit History
Want to know Accel’s recent exits and what the companies were and whether they were IPOs or M&As? There are a variety of exit visualizations and the one of Accel’s exit activity for the last two years is embedded below.
Again, a simple click on any bar in the graph will highlight the actual exits.
