Venturing back North

Recently, the National Venture Corporation Association reported the healthy state of VC investments in USA. Although fund supply dropped from a previous year, it increased 25% from the previous quarter to $4.1 billion. What remained constant is that most funds are sourced by the same small elite pool of VCs.

Government shutdown notwithstanding, there seems to be a accelerating confidence in USA instead of emerging markets. But the Russians, Chinese and Germans are not resting on their laurels:

-The Russians have raised over $300 million via private and public sources intended to acquire and build technologies for Russian interests

-The impending public listing of Alibaba for $200 billion is a sign of things to come for China. The VC market is finally started to heat up, in particular e-commerce, gaming and data services

-SAP Germany raised $1.5 billion, mostly for late stage investments.

Fund supply is up because demand is looking good!

Investment into infrastructure middleware players such as MongoDB (noSQL database) and Ring Central (enterprise VoIP), each valued over $800 million, demonstrates maturity of the 2.0 market. VCs continue to pour hundreds of millions into services for developed markets such as dog sitting, dating 2.0, geneology, student loans and teaching content.

But there is also funding for technology meant for the rest of the world. UN just gave an innovation ward for Aussie firm BiNu, for creating technology that turns feature phones into smart phones. Gates put $8 million into California-based Varentec to help power grids operate efficiently.

Monsanto, one of the world’s most “loved companies”, recently spent $930 million on “The Climate Corporate” to help increase farm yields. There is the mysterious data mining firm Palantir that works for US government. Its valued at $8 billion and was seeded by facebook’s Peter Thiel. 

So, money is certainly moving into high technology. Money is certainly being made in North America, Europe* and North Asia. It is something the equatorial markets and southern hemisphere will need to catchup on.

*Recently, it was reported facebook made $355 million dollars in UK and does not have to pay any tax.