tl;dr: Everything you thought was true actually is, and we put it on a cool map.
Where did companies raise venture dollars in the United States during 2015? If your first gut reaction was to say New York and California, you are correct! But there is more to the picture.
Following Mattermark’s recent report on global fundraising, today we have a more local toy for you to play with. The below chart is a heatmap of venture activity in the United States during 2015. The darker the color on the map, the more active fundraising was in that particular locale during the year.
What is interesting below is not precisely that California and New York and Washington DC were active, but where dollars were deployed outside of the normal areas — where is venture happening that you might not expect? As it turns out, if you live in the Midwest, the answer is to not go North, my son.
If you are on mobile, you may want to use a real computer to enjoy the above map in all its glory.
As a bit of a nerd, I love this sort of thing. But as a mostly failed nerd, I could never build it myself. Happily, Mattermark denizen Karan Goel has actual skills and put this together. How did he do it? I’m glad that you asked:
In the last visualization, we wanted to look at global funding activity relative to San Fransisco. It was a fun little project that received tremendous feedback. This time, we wanted to look at how the United States itself did in 2015. The map [above] shows funding activity at state-level within the US, representing the most active ones with a darker color. Notice, Texas is hot (no pun intended) — $4 billion hot.
I apologize for the intern’s enthusiasm, but the data is quite interesting. What I found encouraging is that there is more venture activity outside of normal markets than I expected. In fact, there are very few states that saw no venture activity at all.
Inside the data set are a subset of funding events that we have on file. It’s over 3,500 cash infusions that are tagged with a state. Or the District, of course. Use the above to understand that while all politics is local, not all of finance. Also, shoutout to the Midwest.