VC funding for open source down 12% in Q3
It will probably come as little surprise to anyone to hear that the amount of - publicly disclosed - money invested in open source vendors in the third quarter was down on the same period last year. $76.5m was raised by open source vendors in Q3, down 12.2% on $87.2m in the same quarter of 2007.
The decline is not exactly unexpected. The overall market was down nearly 6% according to figures from The National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters, while there was bound to be some hangover for open source following the most successful quarter ever in Q1 and solid growth in Q2.
Meanwhile it also worth noting that the figures for open source funding are prone to larger swings than the overall market as the total value is much smaller and the failure of one deal can have a significant impact.
There were some suggestions that the figures for the first half of the year were inflated by vendors choosing to raise money that they didn’t necessarily need (yet) in order to make sure they could survive the predicted economic meltdown. This quarter’s figures would appear to support that theory.
There were just eight deals done in the quarter with a disclosed deal size, giving an average deal size of $9.6m, the same as in Q2 of 2008 and up from from $7.3m in the third quarter last year when there were 12 deals with a disclosed value.
