VC Roundup: National numbers on the rebound, BioLeap raises $5 mil

Welcome to the VC Round-up, where we’ll parse through venture capital news related to Philadelphia-based private equity firms and the companies they fund. Subscribe to the roundup as an email newsletter. If you have any VC-related news to pass along to us, please drop us a line.

DEFINITE READS

Get out your calculators because all kinds of Q4 data is coming out of the woodwork.

Like your best friend who just got dumped, ChubbyBrain reports that VC is in full rebound mound. Q4 saw the highest number of deals in five quarters. There was a slight downtick in the total dollar amount invested, something ChubbyBrain attributes to a handful of large green tech deals in Q3.

A new study on WSJ.com reveals that the number of new startups is largely unaffected by economic cycles. Anaylizing data from 1977 to 2005, the study found that the number of new startups only fluctuated three to six percent a year.

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Shop Talk: Philadelphia’s venture capital community on Twitter

Image courtesy of millionclues.com

If you have ever shown a friend or relative Twitter, you were probably met with a response along the lines of, “Why would I ever want to use this?”

Mostly, it’s hard to quantify the usefulness of a tool such as Twitter, but the startup and venture capital research Web site Chubbybrain has given it their best shot by asking the question: Do VCs who use Twitter invest in more startups?

The report is an interesting look at how venture capital firms use Twitter while judging its effectiveness. But, as expected, the report focuses mostly on VCs in California, Boston and New York. That got us thinking, what local VC’s are on Twitter?
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