Fenwick & West, a US-based law firm, has seen the seventh month of increases to its barometer of venture capital-backed companies raising money in the San Francisco Bay Area while a separate report revealed narrowing differences between American and British start-ups.
Fenwick said 67% of the 122 companies raising money in the Bay Area in the first three months of the year showed increased valuations, versus 16% with so-called down rounds (17% were flat).
The average price increase was 51% with a 30-40% range considered normal in a healthy venture environment, the law firm said.
Fenwick said anecdotally it was seeing an increasing number of early stage companies being funded in a more substantive way by angels, and accordingly delaying their first venture capital round, especially in the internet/digital media space.
Separately, the UK-based National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) said its report, Atlantic Drift: Venture Capital Performance in the UK and the US, showed a narrowing performance gap between the two countries.
However, this was because US funds had done worse over the past decade compared to historically.
Before the dot-com bubble, US venture funds had average internal rates of return (IRR) 20 percentage points higher than their UK counterparts (33% vs 13%). The average returns of UK and US funds raised since 1998 have been very similar (-0.2% vs -1.2%). "It is possible that the performance gap may reappear as US returns improve," Nesta said.
Josh Lerner, professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of the report, said: ‘While our data shows a convergence in performance of US and UK venture capital funds over the last few years, this could be short-lived. Once again, US funds seem better positioned to take advantage of the emerging social media boom – fuelled by recent exits of LinkedIn and Skype – which threatens to widen the gap once more, leaving the UK sector behind."