You have a great idea for a semiconductor startup, you have written your business plan, reviewed it a million times, you’ve assembled your team, and everything is ready to go, all that is needed is this annoying thing called money. Who do you approach? If you are well off or have wealthy relatives that trust you at least to some degree, this might not be an issue. Similarly, if you have good connections in the venture capital community be it on the local or national level, you will be fine most likely as well. But for the rest of us, at least knowing which venture capital firms are willing to invest money into semiconductor startups, in this rather tough funding environment, might be at least somewhat beneficial. Thankfully, the guys at TechCrunch Trends recently published their VC Leaderboard: Top 25 Most Active Dealmakers of 2009 article. Their analysis focused mostly on the number of deals, total funding and the mean for each firm. But being the great guys they are, they also provided a download link for their spreadsheet with all the juicy details for the top 100 venture capital firms. If you’re feeling motivated head on over and download it and start digging, otherwise relax as we examine the date from the semiconductor startup point of view.

First, some general statistics regarding the overall funding for semiconductor startups: In 2009 of the top 100 firms, 47 participated in at least one round of funding relating to semiconductors. There were a total of 78 investments in the semiconductor space which totaled $1.16 Billion. The number of investments paled in comparison to other categories such as bio-tech, consumer web, and software, each of which had upwards of 200 investments, placing semiconductors in 8th place of the possible 15 categories used by TechCrunch, excluding the “other” category. When sorted by the total amount of funding received, semiconductor startups move up to 6th, behind bio-tech, consumer-web, software, clean-tech, and enterprise. When analyzed by the average amount of funding per round, semiconductor startups move up all the way to number 3, behind bio-tech and clean-tech. A few observations can be drawn from this. First, while semiconductors and clean-tech had about the same amount of funding rounds, clean-tech netted almost 36 percent more in funding, showing that investors are currently willing to commit more money to clean-tech startups than semiconductors. Second, while clean-tech was all the rage in the media over the last year or so, the investment dollars are still betting on bio-tech companies: Bio-tech ranked first in total funding rounds, total funding, and average funding per round – it is hard to argue with numbers like these. On the positive side for semis, it shows that if you do manage to make it onto the VC radar, you can still count on raising quite a bit of funding per round.

When looking purely at frequency of semiconductor investments, the top VC firm was DCM with 5 investments, followed by Morgenthaler Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Intel Capital with 4 investments each. When ranked by the total amount of investment, the top 5 firms were DCM, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Interestingly, out of all these firms, only Intel Capital was in the top 10 firms when ranked by overall total deal activity and amount of investment. As we mentioned beforehand, there were a total of 78 investments during 2009, however, only 41 unique semiconductor startups received funding. The companies with the highest number of investments were OneChip Photonics, Kovio, and Amalfi Semiconductor with 6, 5 and 4 respectively. They were followed by Unity Semiconductor, Advanced Inquiry Systems, Aquantina, Pixtronix, Direct2Silicon, and Enpirion with 3 each. A lot of investments are not necessarily a good thing. On the one hand, it might indicated that there are plenty of investors eager to throw a lot of money at the company expecting an outstanding return, conversely it might indicate that the company is burning through cash quickly and needs to repeatedly raise money just to stay float or that initial investors are throwing “good money after bad” with the hope of protecting some of the initial investment. Sorted by total amount of funding received, the list of the top 5 companies is as follows: Aquantia, OneChip Photonics, Kovio, Amalif Semiconductor and P.A. Semi. We wrote about Kovio in August and were quite optimistic about the possibilities for the company’s printed silicon, thus them raising a lot of money is not a big surprise. What is rather puzzling is the fact that P. A. Semi made it onto the list. The company was acquired by Apple in 2008 as such this seems somewhat unlikely. Regardless, big thanks go out to the TechCrunch guys for putting all this data together and making it available, allowing us to get a better idea of the semiconductor startup investment climate.