Top 50 Venture Funded Companies of 2011
In early March 2011, the Wall Street Journal published their "Top 50 Venture Funded Start-Ups" article found here: http://on.wsj.com/gKwHZ7
I recently was moving papers around and found this article, thinking that it would be interesting to do a follow-up with what happened to these 50 companies in 2011. As a side note, these are companies that have been valued under $1Billion and fly under the radar more than DropBox, Yelp or Tumblr.
Here are the stats on these venture funded start-ups:
* IPOs [Trading, Filed or Anticipated]: 7, or 14%
* Acquired: 2, or 4%
* Made Acquisitions in Past: 17, or 34%
* Total Companies Acquired by all 50 Start-Ups: 57
IPOs have come rolling back with a strong wave following LinkedIn, Zynga and Groupon’s first advances that started the waterfall flowing. Aster Data Systems was one of two to be acquired over the year at an extremely high valuation estimated at 14.7x revenue, continuing the trend of high values given to Big Data companies. The winner of “most companies acquired” was Chegg, which is revolutionizing the textbook space with online rental of college books. Chegg, a 3.0 internet-focused company, acquired in the space they know best including a couple mobile web app development shops and websites whose main target is the college student. Exciting news from the Apple camp is expected on January 17th when they are likely to release their views on how paper textbooks will transform into virtual, low cost eBooks.
Posted by AlinaSoltys, Senior Analyst on 16 January 2012
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