Venture Capital and StartUp Research

John Akwei, ECMp ERMp Data Scientist
12/31/2015

Synopsis

The objective of this research is to examine Venture Capital firms, the StartUps they invest in, and the investment types involved.

  • ContextBase, contextbase.github.io
  • Data Science / R Programming by John Akwei, Data Scientist
  • Data on 115 Venture Capital Firms, and 2434 StartUps

Explanation of Data Science Process

  • The document begins with Exploratory Data Analysis of 115 Venture Capital firms combined.
  • Then, the beginning of a Venture Capital Firm exploration app is scripted.
  • Then, the remainder of this document performs Exploratory Data Analysis on the Venture Capital firm, “Norwest Ventures”.
  • Thereby, demonstrating how any of the 115 Venture Capital firms are researchable via nearly identical scripting.

The Crunchbase Data is programmatically optimized in R

setwd("C:/Users/johnakwei/Dropbox/Programming/MarketResearch")
library(ggplot2)
firmData <- read.csv("Clean_Series_A_Research_Calculations.csv", header=T)
firmData$Date <- strptime(firmData$Date, format="%m/%d/%Y")
firmData$InvestmentAmount <- as.numeric(gsub("[/|$|A-J|a-j|L-Z|l-z|()]", "", firmData$Investment))
firmData$InvestmentType <- gsub("[/|$|0-9|.|k|M]", "", firmData$Investment)

Summarization of VC / StartUp Investment Totals

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Investment Totals Are Plotted Over Time

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Then, Basic Coding of a Resulting Data Product is Coded

OutputProcess <- function(VentureFirm, StartUp, InvestType) {
  if (VentureFirm=="All") {VentureFirm <- firmData$VentureFirm}
  if (StartUp=="All") {StartUp <- firmData$StartUp}
  if (InvestType=="All") {InvestType <- firmData$InvestmentType}
  out <- firmData[firmData$VentureFirm==VentureFirm &
                    firmData$StartUp==StartUp &
                    firmData$InvestmentType==InvestType,]
  out
  }

Example Output of the Data Product App

OutputProcess("All", "iRhythm Technologies", "All")

   VentureFirm       Date              StartUp         Investment
31     Norwest 2015-06-01 iRhythm Technologies $27.34M / Series E
   InvestmentAmount InvestmentType
31            27.34       Series E

Finding Major StartUp Investments

          StartUp Amount (Millions)       Type
1           Slack               160   Series E
2  One Kings Lane               112   Series E
3           Avant               325   Series E
4      RetailNext               125   Series E
5         Kabbage               135   Series E
6       AppDirect               140   Series E
7        DataStax               106   Series E
8      RetailNext               125   Series E
9       AppDirect               140   Series E
10      Thumbtack               125   Series E
11         Ele.me               350   Series E
12       GrabTaxi               350   Series E
13            Ola               400   Series E
14          Slack               160   Series E
15          Avant               325   Series E
16        FanDuel               275   Series E
17        Taboola               117   Series E
18       DataStax               106   Series E
19     RetailNext               125   Series E
20           Lyft               530   Series E
21         Square               150   Series E
22          Slack               160   Series E
23        FanDuel               275   Series E

Exploration of Individual Venture Capital Firm Activities

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Conclusions

  • The objective of this research was to examine Venture Capital firms, StartUps, and investment types. and their investments
  • Exploratory Data Analysis revealed that the preferable way of summarizing the data is via
    • a Data Application
    • or individual documentation of Venture Capital Firm investments
    • or StartUp funding histories