CrunchBase Weekly Market Momentum

September venture investments are starting to reverse a summer slowdown trend as we near the end of Q3. Over the last ten years, September is the fourth most active month for startup funding, so the sudden uptick in total rounds was perhaps to be expected. In the last week, 124 startups were funded globally, totalling over $1.1B.

Advertising startups tallied the largest increase from the prior week, with eight venture rounds compared to just three from the prior week. All eight rounds for the week were recorded within the U.S. xAd, from the Big Advertising Apple, scored one of the largest funding rounds of the week with a $50M Series D led by Institutional Venture Partners with participation from existing investors Softbank Capital and Emergence Capital Partners, along with Silicon Valley Bank. Although every advertising round during the week went to a US-based company, they were all based outside Silicon Valley.

Skyword ($11M) and Neon Mobile ($100k) from Boston, Flocasts ($8M) of Austin, Netsertive ($3M) of Morrisville, Talk Local ($2.6M) of College Park, Clarivoy ($800k) of Columbus and Deehubs ($17k) of Seattle rounded out the $75M+ raised for advertising startups during the week.

Just as New York City is the undisputed hub for advertising, Boston is a known hotbed for biotechnology startups. This week, sixteen biotech firms raised venture funding, yet just the $8M Series B for iSpecimen of Lexington went to a Massachusetts firm. Biocartis, a molecular diagnostics company from Lausanne, Switzerland raised the largest round with a €64.5M Series F from PMV Tina Fund, Hitachi Chemical Diagnostics and Johnson & Johnson. The company hopes to finance its rollout of new oncology and infectious disease diagnostic tools.

In another encouraging development, Sonendo of Laguna Hills raised $35M led by Meritech Capital Partners to sell sonic-energy devices to take pain out of root-canal procedures. Of the total $214M+ raised, a trio of European firms – AM Pharma (Bunnik, Netherlands), Poxel (Lyon, France), Alizé Pharma (Écully, France) accounted for almost $36M.

In the third biggest market increase week over week, analytics fundings jumped from just three to six this week. European firms were the main catalyst where Amplidata of Belgium took a $10M Series E from Western Digital and London’s truedash scored its first seed round. In 2014, analytics funding rounds are averaging close to 40 per month, after just 27 total rounds in August. The six rounds this week are still relatively low for the consistently strong market.

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Photo via Flickr user Chris Parker2012