Browsing: Venture capital

A theory is making the rounds, as expressed for example in a Forbes piece last month by David Trainer, that the US economy in particular (perhaps the economy of other nation states as well) is in the throes of a “unicorn bubble,” comparable to the housing derivatives bubble of aRead More

PitchBook’s Adam Putz recently tackled the intensifying political scrutiny of Big Tech and the harm the scrutineers may do by trying to fix something that isn’t broken—the merger and acquisitions market for digital startups. The giants in the field (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google and its parent, Alphabet) are associated withRead More

Equity rounds of VC-backed investment in the financial technology sector retreated in the second quarter of 2019, according to a new CB Insights report. Second-quarter fintech deals dropped 22% on a quarterly basis and 23% compared to the same quarter in 2018. Early seed deal share fell a five-quarter lowRead More

Female Funders, a program within the venture capital company Highline BETA, with offices in both Canada and the United States, has produced a new Women in Venture report, which works with data gathered from more than 300 VC firms and corporate venture arms in both countries “to try to paintRead More

CB Insights, the New York-based machine intelligence platform, has just released its Global Insights Report Q1 2019. The report finds that in the first quarter of 2019, financial technology companies backed by venture capitalists closed 445 deals globally, raising $6.3 billion. The sheer number of deals, then, was up quarter-over-quarterRead More

The relationship between US venture capitalists and Swedish startup companies is the subject of a recent working paper from researchers at the University of Oxford’s Said Business School. This is a striking field of research, if only because in pop culture terms the US is often considered the haven ofRead More

The March 2019 issue of Venture Capital includes a largely pessimistic article about “the evolving environment for the formation and financing of new firms.” Written by Martin Kenney and John Zysman, the article bears the title ”Unicorns, Cheshire Cats, and the New Dilemmas of Entrepreneurial Finance.” Kenney and Zysman areRead More

“With change happening at an unprecedented pace, it is fitting that alternative investment firms are strategically focused on leveraging diverse perspectives in these disruptive times,” says KPMG Chairman and CEO Lynne Doughtie, “The Call to Act,” a new paper that looks at the roles of women in the alternative investmentRead More

A new study of hedge funds that are engaged in the venture capital space, written by George O. Aragon, Emma Li, and Laura Lindsey, contends that some hedge funds quite successfully exploit their expertise in the value of the publicly owned portion of specific industries when they enter the private/ventureRead More

An agtech-focused venture firm has issued a report about global VC activity across agtech and its subsectors. The firm, Finistere Ventures, which describes itself as in the business of helping “ambitious founders transform food and agriculture,” collaborated with Pitchbook in preparing the review. Finistere looks specifically at: (a) macro trends,Read More

On Dec. 6, in Tokyo, Japan, the SuperReturn Japan 2018 event concluded. CAIA was a sponsor of this event, which was billed as “the world’s gateway to Japanese private equity and venture capital.” This is the second part and conclusion of our interview with Jeff Diehl, managing director at AdamsRead More

On Wednesday, December 5, in Tokyo, Japan, the SuperReturn Japan 2018 event convenes. CAIA is a sponsor of this event. Jeff Diehl, managing partner at Adams Street Partners, a multi-national investment manager with more than $35 billion in assets under management, is attending. He will participate in a panel WednesdayRead More

In a new report on the condition of women-owned businesses, part of an annual ongoing examination of business trends by American Express, researchers first take a big picture view (1972 to the present) and then do a swoop-down into the details of 2018.   The conclusion of the study isRead More

PitchBook has posted its 2018 VC Unicorn Report. The introduction explains the meaning of the term. (It has only been in use in its financial sense since 2013, so explanations may still be deemed necessary.) “Unicorn” refers to an entity upon which the private investment markets have bestowed a valuationRead More

In a new study by Harvard Business School scholars looks into the performance of LPs invested with private equity over four decades. In the paper, Investing Outside the Box, the scholars found that it is generally better to invest inside the box. Specifically, they found that the performance of alternativeRead More

Illuminate Ventures, an early-stage high-tech VC firm, has posted a paper by its founder and managing partner, Cindy Padnos, on “gender differences in entrepreneurship.” The paper begins with the observation that nearly half of the Illuminate portfolio companies have a woman as a co-founder. This doesn’t mean of course thatRead More

Finistere Ventures, a venture capital firm that describes itself as in the business of helping “ambitious founders transform food and agriculture,” has teamed up with Pitchbook to produce a dataset that would enable “clear insights into financing activity and metrics in the agtech sector.” The result was the Agtech InvestmentRead More

The Association of Asian American Investment Managers holds its Chicago Regional event on Thursday, July 26 at the offices of law firm Sidley Austin LLP, One South Dearborn, beginning at 3 and continuing until 7. AAAIM confidently proclaims that its line-up of panelists is a collection of “rock stars.” AmongRead More

The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association (CVCA) has posted what it calls an “overview” of the VC and PE Markets in that country in 2017. It reports growth in both of those markets, although growth at distinct velocities. The report tells us that, on the VC side, CanadaRead More

A new report published by the Copenhagen Business School looks into the consequence of private equity investment on an industry-by-industry basis. The authors find that “industries where private equity funds invest grow more quickly [than others] in terms of total production and employment, and appear less exposed to aggregate shocks.”Read More

ARA Law, a firm based in Mumbai and Bangalore, India, has issued a paper on private equity and venture capital in that country. In a foreword, firm founder Rajesh N. Begur observes that there is a positive dynamic now at work in India’s economy, one that in his view “canRead More

A recent publication from Ceres, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting sustainability as a goal in both investing and corporate governance, looks at the value that early-stage clean energy products offer venture capitalists. The publication is the work of a team of five “lead authors and key contributors,” including threeRead More

Preqin has named its top 100 Venture Capital firms, ordered by the amount of capital each firm has raised in the last 10 years. The top 10, with their headquarters city, are as follows: Tiger Global Management, New York New Enterprise Associates, Menlo Park Sequoia Capital, Menlo Park DST Global,Read More

An increase in total buy-out investments proved a big factor in the growth through 2016 of the private equity and venture capital market in New Zealand. A new report looks at this growth and concludes that fund-raising activity there has reached a milestone, hitting again a levels not seen sinceRead More

Are funds of funds a valuable form of intermediation? Robert Harris, of the University of Virginia, Darden School of Business, and three other distinguished scholars looked at this question in a Darden Business School Working Paper, and they decided that, at least with regard specifically to the role of FOFsRead More

Yale, in their 2015 annual report issued this month has broken out their private equity allocation into two distinct segments: Leveraged Buyouts and Venture Capital.  See: This is the first time in many years they’ve offered that level of detail.  And they’ve given the whole report a VC-and-entrepreneurial theme, supplementing theRead More

The analytic company Convergence concludes from its research -- a study of 2,600 ADVs -- that there is a lot of variance in the “depth, breadth, and quality of expense disclosure practices” across fund types and strategies. Read More

A new report from Celent discusses the as-yet unimplemented Title III of the JOBS Act. Celent's Isabella Fonseca offers suggestions for how both wealth managers and tech providers might benefit. Read More

In a study of its own portfolio the Kauffman Foundation found that only twenty of 100 venture funds “beat a public-market equivalent by more than 3 percent annually”.Read More

AllAboutAlpha talks to Jalak Jobanputra, MD at RTP Ventures on the mobile payments market, which is set transact over US$1 trillion by 2016.Read More

Israel is now second only to the United States in terms of venture capital funds, with the highest rate of start-up businesses per capita and also the highest ratio of university degrees to population anywhere in the world.Read More

Lisa Suennen of Psilos Group discusses the new wave in healthcare venture capital: improved care quality while reducing costs.Read More