Today, in partnership with the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and in conjunction with Global Entrepreneurship Week, we shine the spotlight on the venture-backed software industry.   For more information about these and other venture-backed companies, visit www.nvca.org/spotlight.

Venture Facts:  Investment in Software

• 2,326. The number of software companies that received VC funding in the last 5 years.
• $26.3billion. The amount of venture dollars invested in software companies in the last 5 years.
• 396. Number of venture-backed software companies that have IPOd in the last 20 years.
• CA, MA, NY. The states with the greatest number of venture-backed software companies.
• Most active VCs investing in software companies (by number of deals) in the last five years:  Sigma Partners, Intel Capital, Accel Partners, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Innovators in Software

Balihoo, based in Boise, ID, allows distributed marketing organizations to seamlessly translate national strategies into successful campaigns executed at the local level, across all mediums.  Balihoo is revolutionizing local marketing by giving local marketers access to the same enterprise-level marketing tools, creative, strategy and tracking as national brands. Balihoo enables national brands to dramatically reduce marketing expenses and immediately increase local sales revenue. For local affiliates, Balihoo takes the complexity out of local marketing—making it easy to quickly implement an expert, integrated marketing strategy that is consistent with the national brand.  Venture investors include:  Lacuna, Highway 12 Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners.

Next Big Sound, Inc., based in Boulder, CO, provides online music analytics and insights to music industry professionals. The company measures the growth and popularity of bands across major websites and sells actionable insights from its data to band managers and other industry professionals. It allows fans to track the popularity of their favorite artists and offers weekly activity updates. The music industry is bigger than ever and growing. As online activity replaces the dominant industry measures of compact disc sales and radio spins, Next Big Sound helps music industry professionals navigate the new digital marketplace by providing them with useful, benchmarked analysis of recording artists’ digital performance.   Venture backers include:  Foundry Group, Alsop Louie, and SoftTech VC.