U.S. Venture Capital Ecosystem: an overview

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, venture capital (VC) has been an important source of financing for innovative companies. Not only have VCs harvested high profit from their portfolio of investments, but firms supported by VC too, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Alibaba, and Intel have been high gainers. VC financing has had a large impact on the U.S. and global economy. With technology playing a more and more important role, we have seen that FinTech, Life Sciences/Biotech, and Information Technology have started to draw a large amount of capital from VCs in recent years. In this study, we seek to better understand the trends in the overall venture ecosystem in the U.S. and its implications for the future growth of venture financing. Most importantly, we are looking across different VC clusters in the U.S. and providing an analysis for each cluster compared to the others.