Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

A Look at the 472 Private Tech Companies Currently Worth $100M or More (Slides)

An investment research outfit called CB Insights has a report out tonight that identifies 472 venture capital- and private equity-backed technology companies that are valued at $100 million or more.

They include Palantir, SurveyMonkey, GitHub, Square, ZocDoc, Zulily, LegalZoom, Twitter, Warby Parker and others.

CB Insights calls the report “The Tech IPO Pipeline” — which is perhaps a bit generous given its cutoff was a $100 million valuation, and especially considering the problems some newly public Internet companies have faced in the past year.

But still, it’s an interesting slice of the industry, with some observations about who and what is creating value in tech.

For instance, it isn’t cheap to be considered a potential IPO candidate. The average company worth at least $100 million — though many on the list are valued at more than that — has raised $84.7 million, with 90 percent of them in the Series C stage or later.

The 472 companies have raised a total of $40 billion.

Only 20 percent of the companies on the list target consumers, with the remainder selling to enterprises or small and medium businesses.

By breaking down who’s investing in these 472 companies, CB Insights was able to get a real-time tally on which VCs seem to be most effective at finding and helping strong start-ups. Sequoia Capital and Intel Capital both had 35 companies on the list, and Sequoia and Accel Partners have been the best at finding these companies early in their lives, at the seed or Series A round.

The full report is here.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik