Comment by JayNeely | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JayNeely | Hacker News Reader

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Massachusetts is consistently the second-highest ranked state in the nation for VC investment, and has been for the past 28 years (source: NVCA Yearbook). Assuming I haven't F-ed up these calculations, MA has invested an average of 146% more than NY over the past 10 years.

The challenge for startups here has been in finding:

a) seed funding, and

b) funding for consumer web businesses

Both areas have seen significant improvements since five or even three years ago. Since YCombinator left Boston in 2009, Spark Capital (one of the main consumer web & seed-stage VCs here) has raised two additional funds of over $800 million. NextView Ventures raised its first fund in 2012 to invest in seed stage deals, and both New Atlantic Ventures & .406 Ventures raised new funds in 2008 to do the same.

Boston/Cambridge is certainly still far from the amounts of funding in Silicon Valley, but we're far ahead of anyone else, particularly when you factor in population.

I would assume that most of this is biotech investment, however, which is sort of outside the purview of the HN community.

Boston has been the second biggest VC market (counting the Bay Area as one) but every report I've seen shows New York has tied or surpassed Boston over the past few years.

http://mashable.com/2013/02/21/top-cities-startups/

http://mycrains.crainsnewyork.com/stats-and-the-city/2011/te...

http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/tech-venture-...

http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2011/10/13/mass-drops...

From the last link, dated October 2011:

"Still, for Massachusetts to fall behind New York in VC financings is noteworthy, said Anand Sanwal, CEO of CB Insights. New York had already been leading Massachusetts in VC for tech — including Internet, mobile, software, hardware and electronics — since the second quarter of 2010. But due in large part to health care VC activity in Massachusetts, the state had remained ahead of New York in overall VC until the third quarter."

I wish NVCA made a full breakdown of the data available. New York did top MA in "internet-related investments" in 2012, but that's not an accurate depiction of tech investment. MA has strong robotics, hardware, and medical devices industries that contribute to the ecosystem here.

In your last link, they're talking about funds raised by VCs, not dollars invested. NY firms did have a good year in 2011 -- $4 billion raised to MA's $2.5 -- but in 2012 MA firms raised twice as much as NY firms, and MA firms have raised $1.5+ billion in Q1 of 2013 alone.

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