Compare & Contrast: Utah Venture Capital
Curious about the local venture capital market in Utah, I decided to learn more about the two firms that I know a little about: Wasatch Venture Fund and VSpring Capital — I know some of the guys that work there.
Wasatch Venture Fund
For Wastach Venture Fund, below is a picture of where their investment money is going, based on the portfolio companies listed on their site:
Wasatch Venture Fund’s investments appear to be concentrated in the West, with an anomaly in Minnesota. For Utah-specific investments, here is that picture:
Expectadly, the investments are along the highway 15 corridor, with an roughly equal distribution between Salt Lake County and Utah County.
Wastach Venture Fund’s current investment portfolio consist of 37 companies and here is the distribution of their investements by category:
VSpring Capital
Alternatively, VSpring Capital’s geographic distribution of current investments is broader than Wasatch Venture Funds’:
As can be seen above, VSpring Capital’s investments are dispersed across the U.S. In Utah, their investment picture looks like this:
It appears that, in Utah, there are more investments in the Salt Lake County area than in the Utah County area. Regarding the investment distribution by category, VSpring Capital’s investment picture looks like the following:
Interesting Insights
Roughly 50% of investment dollars from both Venture Capital firms are currently in Software companies, which includes hardware. This is different than the “Internet” category, which is focuses more on services, social networking sites, versus software for enterprise-type applications.
Of the current portfolio companies, there are 10 companies in which VSpring Capital and Wasatch Venture Funds are co-investment partners: Aspen Avionics, Cogito, DriveSafety, Exagen Diagnostics, FatPipe, LignUp, MyFamily.com, S5 Wireless, Veralight, Zars Pharma.
Wasatch has a recent exit — liquidity event — DivX had an initial public offering recently. Here is their Amended S1.
A More Interesting Excercise
It would have been nice to have data that shows where the current flow of money is going — category and geographic locations. This would point to current VC Strategy. It would have been informative also if I had data on how much exactly went into each investment category. I’m sure the MoneyTree survey conducted by PriceWaterhouse Coopers provides that data. Good stuff.
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