Boulder companies dominate Colorado’s 3Q venture-capital deals

BOULDER — Companies based in Boulder struck five of the 12 venture-capital deals in Colorado during the third quarter, according to the quarterly MoneyTree Report.

The five deals totaled $48.7 million representing 69 percent of $70.9 million invested in Colorado-based companies during the quarter.

Boulder-based Sovrn Holdings Inc., formerly called Lijit Networks Inc., led the state, garnering $17.9 million from the Foundry Group, Oak Investment Partners and two undisclosed investors. Sovrn is a software company that develops online advertising, user analytics and reader engagement tools.

Other Boulder companies receiving venture capital during the quarter were:

• Occipital LLC, $13 million from Foundry Group, Grishin Robotics, Intel Capital Corp. J.F. Shea Co. Inc. Occipital’s  Structure Sensor is a hardware accessory that attaches to mobile devices such as an iPad that can capture entire scenes in 3-D. The company also makes an SDK software product for creating applications for use with the sensor.

• TeamSnap Inc., $10 million from Crawley Ventures, Foundry Group, Northgate Capital and Vesstar Capital Partners. It provides a mobile platform for keeping coaches, parents and young athletes in tune with every aspect of team life — online tool for organizing and communicating information to sports teams.

• Kindara Inc., $4,195,800 from 62 Mile Ventures, Boston Seed Capital LLC, Good Works Ventures, MENA Venture Investments and SOSVentures. It makes medical devices for women’s reproductive health.

• SlamData Inc. $3,634,000 from True Ventures and several undisclosed investors. It provides an open-source analytics platform for non-structured query language data.

Nationally, venture capitalists invested $16.3 billion in 1,070 deals during the third quarter. Total venture dollars invested in startups for the quarter decreased 5 percent and total deal count was down 11 percent compared to the second quarter when $17.3 billion was invested in 1,202 deals.

The third quarter marks the seventh consecutive quarter of more than $10 billion of venture capital invested in a single quarter. The $47.2 billion invested in the first three quarters of 2015 is higher than each of the full year totals for 17 of the last 20 years.

The report is compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture Capital Association based on data provided by Thomson Reuters.

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