One of the best decisions we ever made at TechCrunch was when we launched CrunchBase, our open startup directory, at the end of 2007. We aspired to make it the best current source of information about technology startups, people and investors. Data is added by TechCrunch editors, our amazing team of interns, and the community at large (it is a moderated wiki, so anyone can contribute data). Over the last year, the database has grown to include more than 15,000 companies, 26,000 people and 1,700 investors. In short, it’s finally gotten big enough to become interesting. So as 2008 drew to a close, we started running statistics on the structured data to see what we could learn.
Today, we unveil our first premium research product, the TechCrunch 2008 Year In Review, which presents our key findings. The report takes a step back from the news that breaks day-to-day and provides a unique perspective on the major trends of 2008. We cover new products, financings and exits across a variety of technology sectors: search, social networking, cloud computing, mobile communications, advertising and ecommerce, consumer media and entertainment, consumer electronics and clean technology.
Below is a portion of the executive summary and key statistical highlights for all to read. CrunchBase counted 1,422 startups that were founded last year alone, and tracked $13 billion worth of venture investments across all stages of companies. It also tracked 284 acquisitions. The deals for which the price was disclosed totaled $41 billion. If you’re interested in further detail and statistical analysis, you can buy the full Year In Review or use the CrunchBase API to retrieve and parse the data yourself.
The full 143-page report (including 100 pages of tables and charts) is available for $149 as a download. We plan to continue refining our analysis and releasing new reports on a quarterly basis. We’d appreciate your feedback on how we can make our research even more valuable.
Subscribe to our research feed and we’ll notify you by email whenever new reports are released.
Executive Summary
Here are some highlights of the year in tech that you will find throughout the report:
Startup Launch Highlights:
- CrunchBase recorded 1,422 new companies formed in 2008.
- More than 1,000 companies were founded through August. The number of new start-ups then declined precipitously each month from September through year-end.
- 1,276 new start-ups have not raised or disclosed financing rounds in 2008.
- 146 new start-ups received $146M in aggregate angel, seed, and series A financing.
- The average number of months between founding and financing was 3.8 months.
Venture Highlights:
- CrunchBase recorded over 1,100 financing transactions representing $13 billion in venture financing, approximately 50% of total capital raised in 2008. (CrunchBase data is still accumulating in clean tech, healthcare, and international categories.)
- Transaction volume followed a rough bell curve– approximately 20% of deals were angel and seed round, 60% were Series A and B and 20% were Series C or later-stage rounds.
- Average round sizes: $0.6M for seed rounds, $1.2M for angel rounds, $6.3M for series A, $11.1M for series B and $20.4 for series C rounds. Later-stage financing averages were $26.4M for series D and $36.5M for series E rounds.
- The top 10% of deal flow captured 50% of capital raised (133 deals raised over $25M, totaling $6.9B.)
- The most heavily invested sectors were clean tech, social networking, ecommerce and mobile, which each received $1B or more in venture.
- Venture activity declined as the year progressed and US markets fell. Deal flow through September averaged over $1B and 100 financings per month. By December, activity was nearly half, or $600M raised from 50 deals.
- The healthy quarters of 2008 showed some aggressive raises. CrunchBase counted 9 companies that raised $100 million or more in 2008: Iridium ($500M), Xiaonei ($430M), Nanosolar ($300M), HomeAway ($250M), SulfurCell ($134M), GridPoint ($120M), Palm ($100M), Rearden Commerce ($100M) and Spinvox ($100M.)
- CrunchBase found an additional 15 companies that raised $50-100 million: Active Network ($80M), Adconion Media Group ($80m), Coremetrics ($60M), Facebook ($75M), Federated Media ($50M), Fisker ($65M), Glam Media ($65M), i/o Data Centers ($56M), LinkedIn ($75M), Plastic Logic ($50M), Realtime Worlds ($50M), Silk Road ($54M), Slide ($50M), SpotRunner ($51M) and Trion ($70M.)
M&A Highlights:
- CrunchBase counted 284 exits in 2008, exceeding $41B (nearly 200 transactions had undisclosed purchase prices.)
- CrunchBase recorded 7 transactions of $1B or more: HP’s acquisition of EDS ($13.9B), Google’s acq. of DoubleClick ($3.1B), Brocade’s acq. of Foundry Networks ($3.0B), buyout firm Hellman & Friedman’s acq. of Getty Images ($2.4B), CBS’s acq. of public company CNET ($1.8B), Microsoft’s acq. of public company Fast Search & Transfer ($1.2B) and Sun Microsystems’ acq. of MySQL ($1.0B.)
CrunchBase counted 42 deals priced at $100M-$1B, and another 39 transactions were announced between $10-100M. - The 4 largest corporate buyers with multiple acquisitions aggregating $1B or more in 2008 were: Google ($3.6B), Microsoft ($2.6B), eBay ($1.5B), and AOL $1.0B. (Note: large corporate buyers frequently do not announce all deals and do not disclose all purchase prices.)
- If you’re a seller, Google and Microsoft were the largest, most consistent buyers between 2007-2008. Yahoo! had been a major buyer in 2007 ($1.5B) but dropped its spending to $200M in 2008. AOL was a strong buyer in both 2007 and 2008, but TechCrunch expects that trend to decline in 2009 given the company’s recent write down of assets, and lackluster results from its $850 million Bebo acquisition. Amazon increased deal flow between 2007 and 2008, and they are likely to remain acquisitive as strong trends in cloud computing continue.
See the table of contents, table of tables and content preview here.
TechCrunch 2008 Year In Review
$149
TechCrunch 2008 Year In Review and Quarterly Reports Q1-Q3 2009
$295
Very good!
The “Startup Launch Highlights:” plot is really scary…. The no. dropped to 20 in Dec’08 ?? I wonder whether the other 1422-20=1402 were still in existence by the time it was December?
http://www.livbit.com
This is laughable. I’d be surprised if anyone bought this. Since when is Techcrunch an analysis company?
Well, someone just did
TechCrunch is way more in the know than the consulting and “analysis companies” who are out there taking people’s money for this stuff. TC is on the beat daily, very plugged in, and it’s great to see them taking a step back at the end of the year to roll up the big picture. $149 is a bargain.
CrunchBase has been really useful to me. Whenever a headhunter comes after me to join a company, it’s the first place I go to check ‘em out. Thanks guys.
crunchbase.com is not loading for me.
Those charts are a bit depressing but I guess one way to look at it that there’s less noise in the system. VCs can focus on meaningful companies.
Server 500 error when trying to search for a company on crunchboard. You have railed on start-ups for much less…. C’mon.
working to fix it
Should be up now
I don’t know why these first few comments are so negative. You guys put a lot of work into this and the data is totally useful. Good job TechCrunch!
Although it’s not a very trustworthy source of information about the PE&VC sector, since it relies on UGC and it doesn’t cover all of the industry (it’s not a Census), it still is a very good indicator of the sector’s behavior, and best of all, in almost real-time.
Congratulations to TC for the great job.
Thank you, we did put a lot of work into it. And you are right, it is not perfect. There are sectors Crunchbase does not cover comprehensively yet (like biotech/healthcare and clean tech). But it covers about half of all venture activity, and for what it does cover we believe it is the best source of company data out there.
Thanks a lot for the report. It will be very useful for many people. About making in to the list of Time’s most overrated blogs, I think that Time need some visitors for their website. For example, I just clicked and went there to see it myself.
I would agree with Times unfortunately.
So far only you techcrunch who is really serious take action into blogger power research to introduce new company that has potential to lead and build the worldwide web more diversity,I love your blog in the past overall 2008 thread and discussion,inthe future hope you have a time as well to review my start up company http://www.perfectmoney.com that always ready for maximization and changes
You stole my identity!!!! I have closed the bank account that you opened in my name and reported your company to SEC and FBI! You cannot hide in Russia! Interpol will get you there finally!
Do not believe these people! They work with ponzies and pyramids. They will sell your email to spammers and your identity and scanned documents to hackers!
They say they are in Switzerland but my lawyer traced them to Russia. God will punish you scammers!
This is a great piece of analysis and the culmination of an obviously huge amount of work on the part of the TC team.
Well done.
Its great to see all the data from CB being assembled in an easily digested fashion.
As a side note, any body think the times really has the authority to pass judgment on blogs? Reporting negatively on a site like TC that clearly scoops them on every piece of tech news they are trying to cover….
The executive summary is concise and well-done (not charred!). Knowing well that TechCrunch is a blog, their report will be useful to start-up folks like me. I intend to purchase the report and hope it will help us develop a realistic capitalization plan.
Good Job TechCrunch!
I assume you’ve got data for January now. You should include that in the stats, so we can tell whether the dip in December is seasonal.
We all assume it’s not, but the data can confirm.
With only one year of data you can’t figure out if the market behavior in any particular month is part of a pattern. Need that 13th month!
I see you made Time’s list of most overrated blogs. #1 spot! Keep up the good work. Or lack there of according to Time. But who is Time anyways?
http://www.time...1879075,00.html
Keep patting yourself on your back. Or wait until web 3.0.
I think that the problem is that they don’t really publish news… they publish what interests *them*.
It’s called a blog. If you want news, go to Time.com. Oh wait, they just publish lists of what interests them too.
Perhaps you can help me understand where the word “interest” comes in on your mission statement:
“TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005, is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies. In addition to covering new companies, we profile existing companies that are making an impact (commercial and/or cultural) on the new web space.”
I’m not trying to start a war, but I don’t really see that word in there. This automatically implies that you have a bias (if it wasn’t already clear). Time also has a bias. Care to state yours?
Sounds like butthurt to me.
@Cash
Seriously though. Read that statement then look on the homepage at the “actively discussed” topics.
Number #1.
“Justin.tv Is Redirecting Porn Queries Into Cash”
This is neither innovating or industry shattering. It’s nothing really. Seriously NOTHING.
Then look at the graph and see that it’s cut in half by the end of the year. There is nothing to report on making this blog “irrelevant” but relevant just enough to sell one last report.
Well… I’m not going to say that there is nothing in this blog to report – they do sometimes push out interesting posts.
Who knows, maybe they just need to update their mission statement… I don’t really mind either way. I’m trying really hard to be indifferent on the matter.
Our bias is pro-startup, pro-innovation. It should be obvious to anyone who reads this blog.
I’d like to think that the service I built (freevoiceline.com) is somewhat innovative… but that’s merely my opinion. I suppose that if the answer will arrive when I can say that the business has either succeeded or failed. I’m fairly sure that it will succeed without any issues (considering the traffic its already getting), but things can always happen
@Erick – depending on the context, what is “obvious” for one is not for the other. The natural result of this type of thinking (especially from the mind of someone who is “in the thick of it”) is that the other person is stupid.
With all these posts about Twitter lately, one would think that the only thing obvious would be that you guys are getting some sort of kickback from them.
I’m pretty sure that this is not the case, and that you guys are really trying to cover what you say (pro-startup, pro-innovation) wherever you can, but the abnormally large amount of posts on one company makes people begin to protest after awhile (as evidence has shown). Shortly thereafter, people will begin to read elsewhere.
Again, I’m indifferent – I don’t really mind what you guys do. I’m just saying have a look a this:
Blog + No balance = advertising = no audience.
I hope that I can continue to read good posts from you guys – it’s not like you can’t write – you can! I just wish there was something more…
Ok, I see what this is about., You are hijacking this comment thread because I chose not to write about your startup.
Wha? No, I’ll stop here…
How is Techcrunch supposed to be such an amazing source of information when the industry is a bit stale at the moment? Even TIME said it in their article. Kind of pointless to put it on the list i say.
Glad to see what TIME wrote being discussed around here…
Fantastic. Well done Heather & the TC team!
I just read the Times article.
Not really different from regular post by a 14 yearold trolling 4chan forums.
Absolutely idiotic flamebait.
Haven’t visited time.com in years before today, probably won’t in the future.
Any chance you could provide a lower price for students?
Time magazine is a joke and has been for a very long time. Their snark re: this blog is perfectly consistent with their obsession with behind-the-curve trends.
This is the perfect product for Techcrunch to produce. Keeping the data fully accessible via API, setting a price that’s completely reasonable for this type of industry report, and offering such a rich executive summary as a freebie – well, you guys don’t need me to tell you this rocks. Anyone who says otherwise is just a hater – tho you have plenty of those around.
nice article
I like the startup launch highlights, especially since you can’t get as comprehensive a view elsewhere.
Though most startups would likely want to enter their information only a few months later – around launch time. So, can we depend on the last 3-6 months of that data?
It would really cool to see the average gap between a company being founded and when it was entered into the system.
A natural extension of the TC brand.
Erick – Any coverage of Life Sciences or Health care Startups/M&A? If not, any plans to ?
Or any recommendations on where to look for that? Thanks!
Adam, the report includes coverage of clean tech, but not bio tech, medical devices or healthceare. We are expanding sectors of coverage and will announce them in future reports, thanks.
Until that becomes available, any suggestions on where to look? Any partners?
Very cool, indeed. Keep it up, TechCrunch — clearly there’s a lot of expansion and new product lines for you guys to offer in the future.
That will make a very good reading: 100 pages of tables/charts and 43 pages of text.
Hoping to get one
http://naijapulse.com
I think the data would be even more interesting next year when you can compare two years full of data. Also it would be nice to get a bit more coverage on the startup scene in Asia.
Everybody knows the trend. If you want the exact trend, take S&P chart, you will get it.
blah blah blah blah.. i hope the 2009 review recounts the story of sissy boy being gobbed at cos he is such a arrogant twat. Oh and can you make a graph as well? thanks
hang on.. you are seriouly tring to charge for this? you guys are nuts, its a joke right?? please say so
guy guys done bother, ive just downloaded this doc from bit torrent. i found the torrent on mininova and believe me its not worth the 10 dollars they are charging …. oh wait
good idea gents!
I’ve just read the report (thanks for letting me review) here’s my take
http://www.web-...-review-report/
I find it incredibly sad and immature that this is the only way you know how to deal with criticism, Erick.
You didn’t refute a single point in the argument and somehow made it revolve around your ass.
So basically, anyone who disagrees with you is disagreeing simply because you didn’t write about their startups. What is this, elementary school? Grow up.
By the way, I’ve been a reader here for years, and I say when it comes to poor reporting you definitely take the cake. I would like Robin and the others to be more active so that your posts keep sinking into the ether. Your posts are always amongst the worst here. Go find yourself a real job and let the informed adults handle this blog and its readership.
Something that TC has going for it is polarization – they definitely have people who love it, and those who hate it. I’m personally just trying to find a way to get my idea out there. I honestly didn’t think that it would fall on so many deaf ears. Will that stop me? Nah, I don’t think so. People who have tried it really like using it – I’ll believe them first
hi,
This posted from techcrunch
Nice article.
really good.. but how about how much revenue these startup make? Raising money is fine and dandy, but not if you’re not earning revenue
Looks like the Crisis does affect startups.
We are working on two startups in Russia. )) hehe ))
And actually things go pretty bad because many investors believe in the second wave of Crisis.
And they really stay away from new projects I see that from inside.