GCV launches in Philly, still looking for companies

From Left: Jacob Gray, Len Lodish, Gil Beyda, Nate Lentz, Tom Balderson, Josh Kopelman

After stopping in Austin, Texas and the 67th Ward, GoodCompany Ventures has finally come home.

Last week, like they did in New York City, the socially-minded incubator gathered some of the sharpest local minds in venture capital to discuss the future of “social entrepreneurship” and to drum up attention for the incubator’s 2010 class, now accepting members until April 28.

Packed into the Blank Rome Conference Center, just off of Logan Square, journalists, students, investors, CEOs and entrepreneurs listened closely as the whirlwind presentations culminated into panel debate.

The result was an analysis of the local venture capital community and a spirited discussion about the merits of “social” investing.

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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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Shop Talk: PA responsible for three percent of all VC-created jobs, 6th in nation

When it comes to ranking private equity markets by the number of deals completed, Philadelphia typically ranks in the upper-half of the middle of the pack. So when the National Venture Capital Association released a report yesterday categorizing markets by state instead of by region, where did Pennsylvania land?

Around 6th place.

Despite Philadelphia ranking ninth in deals made and twelfth in total-invested in Q3, Pennsylvania ranks sixth in the nation when it comes to the percentage of jobs created through private equity investment.

The numbers were released Tuesday by the National Venture Capital Association as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week. The NVCA has been releasing a VC report every day, including the results of interviews with 500 CEOs and VCs.

So as we do every so often, allow us to peel apart the boring spreadsheets to surmise what this means for our fair city.

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Safeguard Scientifics invests $5 million in locally-based Quinnova

Now this is what we like to see: local VCs investing in local companies.

Wayne-based Safeguard Scientifics has invested $5 million in Newtown-based Quinnova Pharmaceuticals. The investment leads a Series B expansion round of $17.4 million.

According to a press release, the company will use the investment in part to fund a Phase III clinical trial and to aid in the company’s sales and marketing efforts. Quinnova specializes in developing drugs that can be applied through the skin and has a patent on technology for a delivering skin medicine in a foam.

According the Inquirer’s Joe Destefano, Quinnova employs 40 people and is developing additional products under its Proderm and Neosalus brands.

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Report: Philly venture capital investment dips in Q3, Silicon Valley nears normalcy

Last quarter, we celebrated the fact that Philly had the nation’s largest quarter-over-quarter increase in venture capital in the U.S. Thanks to a small number of high priced deals, we saw the local VC market jump nearly 500 percent.

So, could Philly keep the upward momentum into this quarter?

Not so much.

According to the most recent Pricewaterhouse Coopers MoneyTree report, the Philadelphia region’s VC market has seen a significant dip in third quarter investment.

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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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SeatGeek can’t be Philly’s lone connection to TechCrunch 50. Can it?

Jack Groetzinger, formally of Scribnia, presents SeatGeek at TechCrunch 50. See the video at the end of the post.

Update: A reader points out that WizHive, started by DreamIt founder Mike Levinson, has Philly connections. Read about the company’s time at TechCrunch here.

If TechCrunch 50 can be a startup’s launching pad to millions (just ask Mint.com), why aren’t more local companies making the journey to the Valley?

One of the marque events of the Web 2.0 world, TechCrunch 50 (formally the TechCrunch 40) is essentially a business plan contest on steroids. For this year’s version, more than a thousand startups applied to be one of the 50 companies that present to judges for a chance to win $50,000 in startup funding and a whole lot of attention.

This year’s winner, RedBeacon, has already been announced, but that got us thinking: did any local companies make the trip West?

Among the 50 companies selected to present to judges, Technically Philly could only find one company with any sort of connection to our fair city: SeatGeek.

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Friday Q&A: Russell Greig of GlaxoSmithKline’s SR One

Russell Greig has come a long way.

The 57-year-old Scotsman, who still carries that signature and recognizable accent, rode a Fulbright scholarship and a nearly three-decades-long career with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to head SR One, the company’s corporate venture capital arm that is no small part of this region’s VC scene, last year.

Greig himself is a fine personification of GSK’s history, now a London-based multinational that grew through several mergers and acquisitions from a 19th-century Philadelphia research laboratory.

GSK still has Philadelphia offices, but it is decidedly an international affair now, neatly represented by Greig and his resume stuffed with international datelines.

SR One itself has, perhaps like Greig who assumed his new leadership role in June 2008, moved. It was launched 24 years ago in Center City but now is a suburban venture, nestled in Conshohocken, like what regional biomedical companies in which they invest.

The University of Manchester alumnus seems to like it here though, raving about the schools and calling those Philadelphia suburbs home to more beautiful trees and seasons than most anywhere he’s seen.

But our life sciences he says, just might not be as distinctive as we’d like to think, no matter the recent attention we’ve gotten for them.

Below, Greig explains why SR One is so Philadelphia, what he would do if he was king and why he “carefully” calls our region’s biomedical innovation disappointing.

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Shop Talk: A detailed look at Philly’s Q2 venture capital numbers

In our last post about VC numbers, we told you, fair reader, that no region experienced growth like Philadelphia. Though to be clear, that growth was mostly because of three mega deals. We also told you that more detailed numbers were expected from PricewaterhouseCoopers on August 3rd.

Well, we would never leave you hanging.

We dove into the numbers and pulled out the important parts, such as which Philly firms were busiest this quarter, the Philadelphia companies receiving the most investment and what industry received the most attention.

Follow past the jump for your quarterly dose of our regions venture capital activity.
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Report: Philly had nation’s largest increase in VC investment in Q2

We at Technically Philly love July.

Not because this is the month we celebrate the birthplace of our nation (Ed.: In the birthplace of our nation) or because we get to travel to the Jersey Shore. No, because we’re amped for the second quarter regional venture capital numbers.

If you recall, last quarter was abysmal for the region and the rest of the country as VC investment slowed to a near halt. Some declared a sort of VC armageddon.

This quarter, the national numbers went the only direction they could have: up.

In the aggregate, the national venture capital outlook only received a modest bump in the second quarter with some regions growing faster than others. But no region saw growth like Philadelphia.

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