National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) officials maintain third quarter investment in venture capital-backed companies topped $27.8 billion, adding 2018 could be a record year for most venture capital investments.
The projection stems from the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor, the authoritative quarterly report on venture capital activity in the entrepreneurial ecosystem jointly produced by PitchBook and the NVCA.
“The first three quarters of 2018 show that the investment environment for venture-backed companies is the strongest it has been in well over a decade,” Bobby Franklin, president and CEO of NVCA, said. “The ongoing trend of concentration of capital into fewer, larger investments appear to be the new status quo for the venture industry – not a passing phase as was once believed. We see this transformative shift reverberating across all stages and sectors.”
Franklin said other ongoing shifts in the industry to watch as the year comes to a close include whether the IPO window for tech companies opens further and if the increased attention and interest of venture investors in non-coastal regions of the country turns from optimism into practice.
The Monitor revealed venture fundraising remained healthy in the third quarter of 2018, with fund count and size increasing from 2017 and pushing 2018 past $30 billion in commitments for the fifth consecutive year.
The fundraising environment showed fund managers increasingly targeted larger vehicles to keep pace with ever-growing deal sizes and more non-traditional VC capital available at later stages.