Venture Capital Transactions 2009

I have been playing with Tableau Public lately. Certainly a worthy addition to the Datageek arsenal. They were so kind as to supply some data to play with. This post concerns the Venture Capital Investments made in 2009.

There are many ways to look at this information. As I was looking for trends and patterns in this data it came to me… If you had the inclination to invest in a company and wanted to know what a good investment is you can check out where Venture Capital funding goes.

The VC firms tend to analyze their potential investments very closely before committing their money. They are not in the business of giving away their money unless they have a reasonable expectation of a return that will pay off.

Perhaps there is an industry that you believe heavily in such as “Alternative Energy” we can start by looking at who is getting the VC funding for alternative energy. We then discover that SolFocus got the lion’s share of VC funding in 2009 for Alternative energy.

If you download the workbook and look at it with Tableau Public, you will now be able to right click on the company name and get news about what the company was doing in 2009.

So who is investing in SolFocus?  We keep looking to see that there are 5 VC companies who provided quite large sums of money into the company.

Again in the work book you would be able to right click on the Investor name and get news and information on the Investor. Also on this last graph you could right click on the bars themselves to get just the news articles that have the investor and company name in the same article.

This looks to be a great deal! Unfortunately on further investigation SolFocus is not a publicly traded company, however one of the VC firms is. Still if you are a private investor and want to see where the current trends are, this should give you some good ideas.