Boulder companies dominate Colorado’s 4th-quarter VC deals

Companies from Boulder and Broomfield counties accounted for 15 of Colorado’s 21 venture capital deals during the fourth quarter of 2014, led by Boulder-based SolidFire Inc.’s monster $82 million funding round in October.

The state’s deals totaled $342.2 million, Colorado’s best performance since the third quarter of 2001 when $350.4 million was raised on 27 deals. The data is according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association, and based on data provided by Thomson Reuters. No Larimer or Weld County companies made the fourth-quarter list.

For the year, the state saw $793 million raised through 86 deals, up from $464.5 million last year and the best year in Colorado since 2008’s $876.6 million on 118 deals.

Nationally, venture capitalists invested $48.3 billion in 4,356 deals in 2014, up 61 percent in dollars and 4 percent in the number of deals from 2013. The software industry saw $19.8 billion of VC investment from 1,799 deals, its highest level since 2000. Internet-specific companies also saw their best year since 2000, raising $11.9 billion.

The MoneyTree Report listed SolidFire’s deal at $60 million, as does a regulatory filing made with the Securities and Exchange Commission in October. But when the company announced the deal, the data storage provider said it had raised $82 million to bring its total funding to $150 million. Just a year earlier, the company, founded in 2010, had raised a $31 million round.

Six of Colorado’s fourth-quarter deals landed among the state’s top 10 for the year, including four local companies – SolidFire, whose deal was the state’s largest of 2014, N30 Pharmaceuticals Inc., MinuteKey Inc., and Door to Door Organics Inc.

The full list of local companies raising venture capital in the fourth quarter, according to the MoneyTree Report, included:

SolidFire Inc., Boulder, $82 million. Provides all-flash storage systems for data centers.

N30 Pharmaceuticals Inc., Boulder, $30 million. Clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company that is developing therapies for the treatment of cystic fibrosis.

Minute Key Inc., Boulder, $30 million. Makes self-service key-making kiosks.

Door to Door Organics Inc., Louisville, $25.7 million. Provides online grocery shopping and home delivery of organic foods.

Tendril Networks Inc., Boulder, $22.3 million. Makes a cloud-based software platform to help energy providers personalize their services for customers.

SendGrid Inc., Boulder, $20.7 million. Provides Email Infrastructure as a Service, moving 2 percent of the world’s non-spam email.

SomaLogic Inc., Boulder, $16.5 million. Biotech company that specializes in biomarker discovery and clinical diagnostics.

Synopsis Surgical Inc., Boulder, $8.3 million and $500,000. Medical-device startup working on a surgical procedure to aid in the treatment of chronic sinusitis.

Modular Robotics LLC, Boulder, $3.1 million. Makes robot construction toys that can be controlled with mobile devices.

Clean Chemistry Inc., Boulder, $2.2 million. Makes a water treatment system for produced water and fracking water at oil and gas drilling sites.

Flashback Technologies Inc., Boulder, $2 million. Developing a machine-learning software platform that provides predictive data analysis solutions.

Lagrange Systems Inc., Boulder, $1.5 million. Provides a Software-as-a-Service application delivery network that improves the speed and reliability of web and mobile applications.

NVoq Inc., Boulder, $456,000. Provides speech recognition software.

MicroBiome Therapeutics LLC, Broomfield, $30,000. Clinical stage biotech company developing drug therapies for metabolic diseases.

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