Not that long ago, the summer months for Global University Venturing featured little activity as students left campuses, and faculty and staff headed to the beaches. In fact, even last year that statement largely remained true. Many universities published reviews about their financial year and some spinouts continued to raise funding, but you would not have struggled to catch up on dealflow if you left for a week or two of holiday.
What a difference a year makes. Since Global University Venturing published its July issue, fundraising initiatives alone have resulted in 17 news reports – a staggering rate of more than one new fund a week.
The funds are not exclusively small vehicles of a couple of million dollars, where it might take only one or two limited partners to pool the cash – for example, Main Sequence Ventures increased its Csiro Innovation Fund by $94.8m to $167m, while Imec brought its Imec.xpand fund to $135m and Ahren Innovation Capital emerged out of the UK’s Cambridge ecosystem with $129m.
The money, as always, is only part of the story. Italy, a country where technology transfer remains in its infancy, made a splash with two separate vehicles that could fundamentally change the local innovation landscape.
First was Astra Ventures, a proposed $93m fund expected to launch by the end of the year to invest in space technologies. The fund will be managed by venture capital firm Primomiglio and will back spinouts, startups, and small and medium-sized enterprises.
Perhaps even more impressively, Politecnico di Milano has unveiled the $70m university venture fund Poli360 in partnership with venture capital firm 360 Capital Partners. The fund may be smaller than Astra Ventures but has the unique honour of being the first of its kind in the country – a sign that Italian institutions are ready to step up to the plate and draw more than one big headline in the near future.
While our quarterly data review is not due until next month, this is still a good moment to cast a brief look at some numbers. Over the course of July and August, a total of $1.29bn was invested and $536m was generated through exits – compared with the same period last year when $832m was invested and $694m was generated through exits.
What is more, this year funding had reached more than $6.67bn across 474 deals by the end of August – up from just under $4.9bn for all of 2017 and steadily approaching the peak of 2015’s $9.38bn. If we include exits, the figure for the past eight months jumps to a massive $18.3bn. That is over $4bn more than the previous record of 2015, which stood at almost $14bn and hardly compares to 2017’s $7.77bn total.
Although the summer months were not quiet, activity has been steadily ramping up during September and, with more than three months still to go, it looks as though both our predictions from the July issue – most deals and most money raised in a calendar year to be broken by the end of 2019 – was a sure-fire bet.
We should have wagered something.
