Brent: A new venture capital report released today reinforced the findings of one a bit over a week ago. It’s drab news. Austin startups saw far less funding in Q1 this year than in Q1 last year.
The gap? Last year, Austin startups had $274M across 36 deals, a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and CB Insights shows. This year, it’s down to $114M across 15 deals. Ouch. That’s not a good follow up to Q4 2016, which also saw a year-over-year decline. But, let’s not lose sight of how baller 2015 (and much of 2016) was.
The changes we’re seeing now just might be some market correction from the days of unrealistically high valuations in Silicon Valley. I suspect by the time we see Q2 and Q3 numbers, we’ll better understand whether this is a return to normalcy or if investors are really losing confidence. Meanwhile, funding was up nationwide with $13.9B in total funding across 1,104 deals. That’s 15% up from Q4 last year, but still far shy of 2015 figures. And Texas ranked 5th among all states with $214M on 25 deals — so that’d be less than Austin alone had last year in Q1. |
