Venture Capital in Québec, Q3 2007 figures

By Heri Nov 15th 2007 in Business

Réseau Capital has released yesterday a study about venture funding in Québec and in Canada. The study is in french and is 8 pages long; you can find it in their “communiqués” area.

venture capital secteur vc 2007

Some key figures:

They have observed a 30% growth in VC investments from year-to-year
Meanwhile, the rest of Canada went through 47% growth. Québec takes up 25% of all investments
Information technology takes 49% of all investments, 40% is in biotechnology and pharma
Expanding companies represented 78% of these investments, while startups and early-stage companies took the rest. Investments to startups declined 26% in Q3 2007
Montreal and the greater Montreal area takes 82% of all those investments in Quebec
Foreign investments represent 30% of all VC investments in Québec
In information technology, telecommunications companies received $25 million, software companies received $12 million, electronics and semi-conductor companies received $10 million, and Internet companies like Praized or Weblo got a total of $6 million

The key figure I am not so happy with here is the decline in funding to startups, it has seen 26% decline in Québec this year, while it has grown outside Québec. However, all the figures are rising, and I don’t think one should be too alarmed at the state of VC funding.

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Comments

Frank November 15, 2007

Strong caveat on the 26% decline in start up financing – it is probably way more. The number is misleading in the sense that the 28M$ invested (19 companies – if you read the detailed investments by the various funds, you will not find start ups) in the last quarter cover seed, start-up and beginning of commercialization from all economic sectors (not just high tech). For the last few years, there has close to zero seed and start-up financing. These investments are done by angels and are not covered by Reseau Capital. It still has this big category from past years where t2c2 and the Innovatech’s network specialized in this type of investment.

Over all, the number of investment, dollar amounts are very good, but I’m convinced start ups did not fare well. We should take example from Ontario that just announce the creation of a 165M$ fund (with BDC and Manuvie) aimed at start-ups.

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Alex November 15, 2007

I wonder why for such a fairly big country like Canada which is also close to US , Canadian companies raised only 0.5 billion $.

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Heri November 15, 2007

alex: those are the figures for third quarter only.
fiy, investments were proportional to those found in the US in the late 90′s. investments plunged in canada after the dot com crash, and haven’t really recovered yet, especially in IT.

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Robin Ginolfi January 24, 2011

Why do this content jogs my memory of some other very similar the one that Someone said some other place?

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