Venture Capital’s Expanding Universe
Over the past year VCs have funded tech startups in virtually every corner of the economy.It’s a good time to be dialing venture capitalists for dollars. So-called unicorns, tech startups with a valuation of $1 billion or more, continue to proliferate (Fortune found 104 at last count). But investment in private technology companies of all sizes is surging. To show the breadth of this boom, we turned to Quid, a San Francisco analytics company founded in 2010. Quid screened its proprietary database of companies with “novel technologies or products” for those that had received at least $5 million in VC money over the 12 months through June 1, 2015, and identified 2,233 in a range of industries. (Twenty that received investments have already had IPOs.) The $64.5 billion invested by VCs in these startups was 25% higher than the same period the year before and 92% higher than two years ago.