While crunching the data and reflecting on the past year, it’s clear that 2012 was busy. Version One Ventures made eleven investments, including three angel investments that rolled over into the fund.

Here are some of the more interesting details to share about our activity in 2012:

• Version One invested more than $2.5M in 2012
• Our focus centered around three investment areas: e-commerce (Frank & Oak, Julep, Instacanvas), SaaS (Jobber, Top Hat Monocle), and marketplaces/platforms (tindie, GroupTalent, Clarity) – with a relatively equal split across all three areas
• Investments were roughly 50% B2C, 50% B2B – this was the highest share for B2B investments since I started (angel) investing 6 years ago
• 2/3 of 2012 investments were seed deals and 1/3 were Series A
• Version One companies were a 50/50 split between the U.S. and Canada… with startups in the Bay area, Edmonton, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, Portland, Seattle, Toronto, and Vancouver.

 

Announcing Version One’s final close

In addition to wrapping up 2012, I’m happy to announce the final close of the Version One Ventures fund with $19 million in committed capital. Our original target was $10M, so I’m extremely grateful at the confidence our investors placed in the fund. In addition, I’m particularly excited that this final close includes an institutional investor, the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) – their announcement can be found here.

Moving forward, we’re continuing our focus on e-commerce, SaaS, and marketplace opportunities in the Seed or Series A stages. It is still early times for the web and we’re excited to work with great entrepreneurs looking to change their industry or the world.