Week 10/04/2004 through 10/10/2004

Prepared by: CapitalHunter.com Staff

What’s Hot this reporting period are venture backed companies based in California operating in the software industry and have raised their Series B round of financing.

On Wall Street CapitalHunter.com identified the following IPO’s and Secondary Offerings:

1. B&G Foods Holdings Corp. had its initial public offering this week for $260.9 million and trades under the ticker BGF.
2. Gold Kist Holdings had its initial public offering this week for $132 million and trades under the ticker GKIS.
3. IntraLase had its initial public offering this week for $81.9 million and trades under the ticker ILSE.
4. CMS Energy raised additional capital through a secondary offering for $259.4 million and trades under the ticker CMS.

CapitalHunter.com was able to verify that $192 million of venture capital was invested in 18 U.S.-based companies during this week’s reporting period. The average deal size was approximately $10.67 million. The amount of venture capital invested this period decreased by 53% from last week’s $411 million.

Geographically,8 California companies raised $65.40 million in venture financings. The largest private venture financing in California this period was into Centric Software raised $19 million. Centric Software is a San Jose based company that enable manufacturers to optimize product innovation by leveraging the collective competencies of their extended enterprise and supplier network to deliver compelling, market-dominating products within critical windows of opportunity.

The software sector raised 75% of the venture capital this period. Fourteen software companies raised $142.45 million in venture financing. Altair Engineering a Michigan based company was the largest financing in this category raising $30 million in venture financing. Altair Engineering is a provider of high-end, open architecture Computer-Aided Engineering (CAE) software for modeling, visualization, optimization and process automation.

Companies raising their Series B round of financing led this week’s venture capital activity. Series B financings represented 75% of the total venture capital deployed this period. The largest Series B financing was into Massachusetts based Diligent Technologies. The company raised $22 million and delivers scalable, proven virtual tape software providing customers with faster recovery, reliability and guaranteed data protection at a lower cost.

The three largest venture deals this period are as follows:

The following seven and other unnamed investors funded the above mentioned top three venture capital investments for $71 million:

A total of 43 worldwide equity financings of private and public companies occurred during this reporting period. Each of the 43 equity financings are profiled in a weekly report which include venture financings, private placements, secondary offerings, PIPE’s, and IPO’s.

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