For months many members of the media have been citing a recovery in the venture-backed exit market while the NVCA has been reminding the public that we still have a long way to go before we can make such a claim.  While we still believe we have a distance to go before a full recovery, the first quarter of 2010 offered the first real signs of optimism since the financial crisis began. 

Today we released our Q1 2010 Exit Poll release with Thomson Reuters .  The data showed the most quarterly venture-backed IPOs since the fourth quarter of 2007 and the most M&A transactions ever in a single quarter.  While the volume is encouraging, we are more focused on the quality of these transactions which seems to be holding up well.  Eight of the nine IPOs of the quarter are trading above their offer price and the average disclosed M&A transaction for the quarter is up from the total average for 2009.  We hope this momentum will continue into the second quarter of 2010 and beyond, especially in the IPO market where we need to see at least 15-20 offerings each quarter to characterize the market as healthy.  This threshold of activity is not unreasonable as there are currently 43 venture backed companies in registration. While several of this quarter's IPO’s initially priced lower than expected, their subsequent performance will perhaps encourage other companies to price strongly in the coming weeks and months. 

We hope that the exit activity in Q1 will make room for more new investments in firm portfolios.  We will begin to get a clearer picture of investment trends in just a few weeks when we release our MoneyTree investment numbers.  Stay tuned.

Bloggers and journalists in need of Q1 2010 Exit Poll embeddable charts can find them here.