VC Roundup: Edison Ventures helps Rowan, Comcast Interactive Capital gets props

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.

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Edison Venture Funds, based in New Jersey, is funding a Rowan University program to send engineering students to local K-12 schools to help promote engineering as a career option. Rowan University has made large investments in its engineering program recent years, propelling it to among the nation’s best.

DreamIt Ventures managing partner Steve Welsh has backed out of the race for Pennsylvania’s sixth district. “I simply believe I can do more by helping other candidates,” said Welsh in a statement posted to his website.

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VC Roundup: Philly is home to 2 of the most active VC firms in U.S., DreamIt open for applications

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

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has released its Q4 MoneyTree report, complete with regional data showing Philly bouncing back from a disappointing Q3 with $142 million being invested in 28 deals, mostly in medical and biotechnology. See all the deals listed here. Silicon Valley continues its rebound with $2.2 billion of investment, nearly four times the next closet metro area. In total dollars invested, Philly ranks 12th out of 17 markets.

If you ever wonder why there is so much First Round and BFTP news on Technically Philly, its probably because First Round Capital and Ben Franklin Technology Partners were ranked the forth and 19th most active VC firms in the nation by Dow Jones VentureSource, respectively. The Wall Street Journal points out that the average age of firms on the list is 24, while First Round Capital is only six years old. Meanwhile, BFTP/SEP announced it has invested nearly $1 million in five local companies.

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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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Friday Q&A: Sherrill Neff, founding partner of Quaker BioVentures

Sherrill Neff

Thanks to the city’s glut of local universities and pharmaceutical companies, Philadelphia is a wonderful environment for a biotech startup to begin and to exit.

However, with the lack of an IPO market and current economic conditions, statups often need hundreds of millions of dollars to see their idea from research product to sale to big pharma.

And that’s where Quaker BioVentures steps in.

Founded in 2003 by Ira Lubert, Brenda Gavin and Sherrill Neff, Quaker takes pride in keeping all of its investments local — and for good reason. Philadelphia benefits from being in the center of the perfect storm of plentiful university research combined with a large number of pharmaceutical companies having major local operations.

“It’s important we get to know the [big pharmaceutical companies] really well, that they are our friends socially and professionally,” says Neff. “It’s easier here than if we were sitting on the West coast trying to have that interaction.”

After raising $280 million in 2003 and an additional $420 in 2006, Quaker has invested in over 25 companies, most based in the tri-state area.

We talked to Founding Partner Sherrill Neff about why Quaker only invests locally, how the citiy’s biotech market has evolved and why he credits lion slaying as one of his hobbies.

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Friday Q&A: Jane Hollingsworth of NuPathe on Zelrix, migraines and more

The Zelrix acute-migraine patch introduced by Conshohocken-based NuPathe. Will it fight upstream to market?

Updated 9/18/09 @ 2:42 p.m. Name in title

When Jane Hollingsworth takes a pill to help fight a headache, she might get nauseous or sicker still.

More than half of American adults suffer similarly, she says, which is a bear of a nuisance for anyone with an acute migraine and a problem with the most common medicinal cure. Still many just put up with the pain.

Because it’s affecting millions of people who just might happily pay for a solution, there is admitted industry buzz swarming NuPathe, the Conshohocken-based specialty pharmaceutical company that says it could help everyone with a pain in their head who doesn’t want a pill to swallow. After a scheduled new drug application is filed next year, you just might know someone who uses Zelrix, a NuPathe-manufactured patch that secretes migraine-fighting medication into the bloodstream.

Jane Hollingsworth

“There is no patch for migraines now. There has never been,” says Hollingsworth, 50, the 25-employee company’s CEO who helped launch it in 2005. “It’s very difficult to get drugs through the skin quickly, which is important for migraines especially.”

Difficult for everybody else, she must mean. Because, as the company’s comprehensive phase-III trial data summary presentation suggested at last week’s 14th Congress of the International Headache Society held at the Convention Center, things for NuPathe are going, as Hollingsworth says, “exceedingly well.”

After the jump, the Ardmore native tells us how technology makes Zelrix work, why biomedical entrepreneurship in Philadelphia lags behind smaller hubs like Boston, why she has to cheer for the Flyers and more.

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Quaker Bioventures invests in Rapid Micro Biosystems

Quaker BioVentures, a venture capital firm based in University City’s Cira Center, has been on a roll the past month.

In June, partner David King was named to the board of the University City Science Center and the company was profiled in the Wall Street Journal for shifting some of its resources from biotech to medical devices.

The good news continued yesterday when it was announced that Quaker was one of the Series A investors in Rapid Micro Biosystems, a company that makes technology to detect troublesome microbes that can slow down the drug-making process.

When Technically Philly asked for the exact share Quaker BioVentures invested, the company said it does not disclose amounts.

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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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