Week 04/17/2006 through 04/23/2006

Prepared by Capital Hunter analysts

Venture capital investment slipped this week, as only $422 million was raised by 42 companies, a sharp decline of 28% from the $583 million raised last week. This weekly drop was largely expected due to the abnormally large amount of funding companies raised last week, but $422 million is still a healthy amount and shouldn’t be cause for concern. In fact, if you subtract the $150 million Amp’d Mobile raised last week the week-to-week change in VC funding would have remained essentially flat. Software investment, which only accounted for a paltry 7% of last week’s funding (normally software accounts for anywhere from 20% to 25% of weekly investment), surged this week with $143.7 million being placed in fifteen separate companies, easily eclipsing the amounts raised by every other sector, including VC favorite biotechnology and telecommunications, last week’s big winner. Sector funding after software was fairly evenly spread between seven different industries, including semiconductors, financial services (which consisted of only one investment, Gain Capital, which also happened to receive the largest investment this week with a $40 million Series D infusion from VantagePoint Venture Partners, Tudor Investments, Edison Ventures, Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, and Blue Rock Capital), media & entertainment, medical devices, consumer services, and the aforementioned biotechnology and telecom sectors.

IPO activity remained slow this week, with only two new companies joining the public ranks. The two companies are as follows:

Omrix Biopharmaceuticals NASDAQ:OMRI priced at $34.4 million and is a developer of biosurgical and passive immunotherapy products derived from human plasma.

Complete Production Services NYSE:CPX priced at $624 million and is a provider of value-added products and services to the oil & gas industry.

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CapitalHunter.com was able to verify that $422 million of venture capital was invested in 42 U.S.-based companies during the past week. The average deal size was approximately 10.05 million. The amount of venture capital invested this period decreased by 28% compared to last periods $583 million.

California was the largest recipient of venture capital funding this week. Twenty-one California companies raised $196.2 million in new equity financing, which accounted for 47% of the total venture capital invested this reporting period. The largest private venture financing in California was placed into the enormously popular social networking site Facebook.com. Facebook raised $25 million in Series B financing from Greylock Partners and Meritech Capital Partners as well as return backers Accel Partners and Paypal founder Peter Thiel and is a social networking site for college and high school students.

The earlier mentioned software sector raised the most venture capital this reporting period, with fifteen companies raising $143.7 million in venture financing, which accounted for 34% of the venture capital this period, the same as last week. The largest private venture financing in the software sector was Visible Path. Visible Path raised $17 million in Series B funding and is a provider of a capital management platform that uses social network analysis to locate, leverage and create relationship capital.

Start-ups raising their Series B rounds of financing represented the largest share of the funding pie, as 37% of all money invested this period went into such companies. The largest such financing was placed into Jingle Networks. Jingle Networks raised $26 million and is a provider of a free 411 directory assistance service.

The three largest venture deals this period are as follows:

The following thirteen companies and other unnamed investors funded the above mentioned top three venture capital investments for $91 million:

A total of 83 equity financings of private and public companies occurred during this reporting period. Each of the 83 equity financings are profiled in a weekly (in this case biweekly) report which include venture financings, private placements, secondary offerings, PIPE’s, and IPO’s.

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