Where are NYC Startups and Who is Funding Them?

Editor's Note: This post was created in collaboration with Chris Paik, who was invaluable in helping me crunch the numbers. He's looking for an internship in venture capital, so if you like this post, get in touch with him via his blog. Lots of you enjoyed my post a few weeks ago on buzz and fund size among NYC venture firms. But why not take it further? Why not use all the data in Crunchbase of financings of NYC companies over the past five years?

So that's what we did. And we got data for 814 venture financings since March 2005 worth a total of $3.1 billion. We were careful to exclude angel and strategic investors, since data around those deals are poor and would make the results harder to parse.

To start, let's look at all venture firms that have completed over 7 financings of NYC-based companies in the past 5 years. Here, you can see how they stack up based on number of deals done: Keep in mind that there's a long tail here -- this chart represents 300 total financing events, only 37% of all the venture financings of NYC-based companies in Crunchbase. The rest of financings were done by other firms.

But this is just parsed by the number of financings -- with no thought given to the size of the deals. Thus, let's look at the (relative) deal size by the firms listed above when investing in NYC companies:

You'll probably notice that there aren't any labels on the Y-axis. In brief, I don't trust the absolute data here. It's often impossible to distinguish the relative contributions of investors in a syndicated deal. For example, if Union Square does a $1 MM seed deal, there isn't any ambiguity there. But if the company's next round is a $10 MM round syndicated among two growth capital firms and Union Square, there's no way to really know how much each firm invested. However, it is probably safe to say that the growth capital firms do bigger deals than Union Square, since they first joined the syndicate at a later (bigger) round. Thus, the relative data is accurate, but the absolute numbers are highly questionable.

Since we selected these financings based on the zip code of the funded company's headquarters, we can drill down a bit further and draw some really interesting conclusions. Specifically, where are funded companies? The following map looks at two factors: the number of financings in the zip code (the color of the dot) and the total amount of venture money invested in the zip code (the size of the dot):

There are certainly some surprising things here, at least to me. This entire map seems to be shifted a bit further north than I expected; are there really that many well-funded startups in Murray Hill? I also expected to see a bigger presence in TriBeCa.

There's a lot of data here, and I'm sure there will be follow-up posts -- especially as we dive into the data on the types of companies that are receiving this financing.