Neither snow in Boston nor a drought in California could stop venture capitalists from handing out cash in the first quarter to start-ups and established private companies alike.
Funding of private U.S. drug companies tracked by BioWorld increased to $1.94 billion in the first quarter of 2015, more than double the $814 million VCs handed out in the year-ago quarter.
Moderna Therapeutics' monster $450 million series C round certainly helped pad the numbers, but even subtracting the outlier, financing in the first quarter was still up substantially. (See BioWorld Today, Jan. 6, 2015.)
Most impressive is the large increase in funding for early stage companies. Total funding in both the series A and series B categories more than doubled from the year-ago quarter.
Interestingly the total amount raised didn't increase by doubling the number of deals – there were only two more series B deals for example – but because the sizes of the funding rounds were larger. The median deal for series A investments increased from $16 million a year ago to $20 million in the most recently reported quarter. The increase in series B deal size was even more impressive, jumping from $10 million to $33 million with five companies getting more than $40 million each for their second round of funding.
And who doesn't like the goose egg for series B funding of specialty pharma companies, defined as a company in-licensing drugs or using a platform to reformulate drugs. The companies getting funded are doing real research with 62 percent of them already in the clinic.
While VCs were gallivanting around funding companies left and right, far fewer companies went public in the first quarter of 2015 than did a year ago (nine vs. 28).
Of course, we have to keep the decline in perspective. In the first quarter of 2013, we only saw four companies go public on the U.S. exchanges. It appears the decline may be due more to the pent-up demand for public capital working its way through the system rather than the IPO funders taking capital off the table. The average IPO raised $99 million in the first quarter, substantially higher than the $69 million raised by the average company in the first quarter of 2014.
And some of the decline in IPOs on U.S. exchanges is associated with companies going public on exchanges in other countries, which we rarely saw last year. In the first quarter, six drug companies went public on foreign exchanges, compared to just one in the first quarter of 2014.
Here's hoping the Sierras gets some spring snow, Boston doesn't get any more and VCs don't do anything differently in the second quarter.
