Prepared by Capital Hunter analysts:
Venture capital investment, which as you recall badly languished last period with a paltry $178 million, surged to over $720 million this period on the back of increased investment in digital advertising and alternative energy in addition to the normally high amounts of capital placed in software and life science companies. Vantage Media, which provides performance-based search engine marketing and lead generation services, raised $70 million in its first institutional round of financing from Scale Venture Partners (formerly Bank of America Venture Partners), Tudor Ventures, Montgomery & Co. and Integral Capital Partners and is officially the largest funding of the week. The company also hired Steve Jillings as its new CEO, coming over from Frontbridge Technologies, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2005. The company plans to use its new capital to increase its market share in the educational market and expand its marketing and sales to support its growth. As for alternative energy companies, CoalTek, which develops technology to convert coal into a cleaner alternative, raised $33 million in new financing from Warburg Pincus and Draper Fisher Jurvetson in order to continue production of their clean coal, which they expect to reach 500,000 tons by the end of 2007. Biotechnology companies raised the most amount of money, however, as close to a quarter of all money raised this period went to such concerns. Microbia, which develops next-generation gastrointestinal and cardiovascular therapeutics, raised $50 million in Series F funding from Ridgeback Capital, Morgan Stanley, Fidelity Biosciences, Venrock Associates and Polaris Venture Capital in order to continue research of their three drug candidates currently in Phase II trials. Another biotech company, TargeGen, raised $40 million from a consortium of venture capital firms in order to continue development of its macular eye drop, which is on the verge of passing its Phase I trials. The wide disparity between this period and last period highlights the sometimes irrelevancy of comparing week-to-week data, as the announcements are not necessarily fluid and can create false alarms. We still expect funding to be in the $300-$450 million range as we reported in our last newsletters, but there is still the possibility we may have outliers like we had the past couple of weeks.
The IPO market had a surprisingly good week considering the precipitous drop in stock markets throughout the world last week. As you already know by now, the US stock indices all took a tumble, with the Dow Industrials declining 4.2 percent, the S&P declining 4.4 percent and the NASDAQ 100 declining 5.9 percent. Despite this bit of bad news, however, we still had four companies brave the public waters, up from one (well, if you don’t count ETFs, zero) last period. I’ll let you use the links below to find more information about the companies at hand. Without further ado, here are the four companies that listed this period:
Rosetta Genomics
NASDAQ:ROSG priced at $25 million and is currently developing next-generation technology based on MicroRNA.
Oceanaut
AMEX:OKN-U priced at $150 million and is a blank-check company spun off from Excel Maritime Carriers looking to acquire assets in the water transportation sector.
Churchill Ventures
AMEX:CHV-U priced at $100 million and is a blank-check company looking to acquire assets in the communications, media or technology sector.
Coleman Cable
NASDAQ:CCIX priced at $268.6 million and is a provider of electrical wire and cable products in the United States.
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