NE Ohio Companies Raise Record Amount of Venture Capital in 2014

This month, JumpStart released the 2014 Northeast Ohio Venture Capital Report — a comprehensive yearly assessment of angel and venture capital investment activity in our region.

We’ve been compiling these reports since 2004. But unlike past years, 2014 gives us a unique chance to look back over 10 years of work in Northeast Ohio to identify trends and measure the progress of our region.

So, how’d we do?

In 2014, the total amount of venture capital raised by companies in Northeast Ohio hit a 10-year high of $336 million, more than tripling the $103.5 million raised in 2004. The report shows a similar trend in the total number of companies receiving venture capital, which more than tripled from just 36 companies in 2004, to 104 companies in 2014.

Overall, investors have pumped $2.3 billion into Northeast Ohio companies in the last decade.

 JumpStart does not claim to have helped all of these companies achieve their impressive results. Nor do the other partners in the Northeast Ohio ESP Network, a collaborative group of more than a dozen entrepreneurial service organizations that receive partial funding from the state of Ohio.

However, we’ve helped a lot of them. In fact, of the estimated 412 Northeast Ohio companies that received venture capital investment in the last decade, roughly 75% received investment, assistance or both from the Northeast Ohio ESP network.

In total, the network’s collective work across the last decade has helped nearly 1,000 entrepreneurs raise $1.7 billion in capital and create/retain more than 4,000 jobs.

Because we work with so many startup companies, we are in a unique position to gather the kind of data seen in this report. We might not catch every single deal in Northeast Ohio — especially non-public deals. However, our yearly survey of the companies we work with, combined with publicly available information, creates one of the most comprehensive regional venture capital reports in the Midwest.

Overall, the statistics in this report are very encouraging. However, it’s not all wine and roses. Our region also has seen a persistent stagnation in “early stage” capital activity over the last five years.

This is a strong statistical marker of the growing “Series A” gap that has many of Ohio’s economic leaders very anxious.

Along with accelerating job growth, we must prioritize the filling of this Series A gap if we hope to build on the other encouraging trends shown in this report.

There is much work ahead. However, the last 10 years have been a true game-changer for Northeast Ohio, and we should all take a moment to recognize how far our region has come. No one person or organization could have achieved these results alone, and I believe our future success will depend on our continued spirit of collaboration.

See for yourself how Northeast Ohio’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has taken off over the last decade. You can download the 2014 Northeast Ohio Venture Capital Report at https://bit.ly/1KhYT8e.