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Startups tell different stories about access to capital
Finding financing for entrepreneurial projects has never been easy. There have always been more entrepreneurs looking for financing than there is financing in the state, mainly because Colorado is such an attractive place to be it attracts people with an entrepreneurial spirit.
Toby Krout, executive director and co -founder of Boomtown Accelerators in Boulder, has been in the industry in Denver since 1994. He said that even back then, people complained about the lack of venture capital funding across the Front Range. He said that Colorado has "some amazing and incredible venture capitalists" but it is also very important to have a founderfriendly venture industry.
"There's a lot of capital out there, more than we ever had before, but the way it gets deployed is vital and so I think that we're really fortunate to be in Colorado which is a founder-friendly ecosystem and has some leadership in that space," he said.
Data compiled by PitchBook, a national firm that tracks public and private equity markets, including venture capital, private equity and mergers and acquisitions, finds that nationally, there has been a steady rise in the amount of seed-stage activity since 2008, with $3.7 billion in funding in 2017. Colorado's percentage of that funding was 2.98 percent. Back in 2008, Colorado's percentage of $266 million in deals nationwide was $3.43 percent.
Colorado technology incubator Innosphere, which collaborated with PitchBook on the data, said that the number of seed stage deals rose sharply between 2011 and 2014 but has declined ever since. The amount of money given out continues to rise, however.
"That implies that there are fewer seed stage deals being funded across the U.S., but they are larger in size, which, in Innosphere's estimation, further widens the seed stage funding gap."
The report added that "even with significant growth in the Colorado ecosystem from 2008 until today, we have not grown the number of seed stage funding deals in the state."
Seth Levine, a founding partner of Foundry Group, a Boulder-based venture capital firm with nearly $2 billion in assets under management, said that "for much of the last decade, Colorado has been considered a strong but second tier venture and startup market. We consistently...