Venture capital mega-financings seem to be more frequent these days, and with each one, we hear the chatter and bloviation about a bubble. So we wanted to see if mega-financings (those greater than $100 million) are actually on the rise.
In the year to date, there have been 45 $100M+ financing rounds to private tech companies, already a 50% jump from the number of $100M tech funding rounds in all of 2012 and a 105% increase from the number of rounds in 2010. And while 2011 saw a jump in large consumer rounds buoyed by massive pre-IPO deals to Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, 2013 levels have surpassed those as well.
But in a sign that venture capital investors may be staying disciplined despite signs of frothiness, the data changes quite a bit when looking squarely at $100M+ tech financing rounds that include the participation of at least one venture capital investor. In fact, with just under a month left in the year, the total number of $100M+ deals in 2012 and 2013 YTD appears to be spurred mainly by corporates.
And while hot upstarts like Pinterest and Snapchat have raised or are raising mega rounds at heady valuations, the number of U.S. VC-backed $100M+ financing rounds to B2C companies has actually shown a pretty steep decline since 2011, falling from 10 in 2011 to just 5 in 2013 YTD. The slack in B2C in the US, however, is picked up by international markets where B2C mega-financings remain the rage made often by the likes of Rocket Internet and their investment syndicates as well as China-based investors.
