SEC Watch Company Blog

Apr 27

Introducing the SEC Watch Daily Brief

We created the SEC Watch Daily Brief to provide a snapshot for the days most important SEC Filings.  This new daily publication is COMPLETELY FREE.

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Apr 02

March private equity investments

Privately-held companies that raise capital are required to file a Form D with the SEC to declare exempt offering of securities. We created the map below using data from SEC Watch’s Research Platform for March Form D filings. Total values of investment are grouped by state and exclusive of pooled investment funds.

March Form D Investments by State

Mar 23

Daily S-1 filing activity

Google Visualization API Sample Check it out - daily S-1 filing activity charted from January, 2008. There was a lot more activity back then! In case you were wondering, the huge spike in May, 2009 was from filings by healthcare giant HCA, Inc., the largest private hospital operator in the U.S. Companies file S-1 prospectuses prior to public offerings of securities so these filings are a great source of investment information. For more details, there’s a great overview here and you can always access filings directly on SEC Watch.

Mar 22

A quick look at investment in the healthcare industry

A lot of money goes into the healthcare industry.
Given our fondness at SEC Watch for analyzing Form D data on private funding, we thought this would be an appropriate time to highlight healthcare-related investments in the past year. Out of 33 industry categories, 5 are related to the broader healthcare industry. Check out the numbers below for 2009, and for detailed information on each company and investment, download our Excel data several posts down:

Other Health Care: $5,135,703,164 
Biotechnology: $1,449,826,230 
Pharmaceuticals: $858,700,448 
Hospitals and Physicians: $100,437,958 
Health Insurance:$8,193,189

Total: $7,552,860,989 or 17% of all Form D investments

Mar 18

2009 Tech Rankings

We’ve ranked the states by funding received by tech companies in 2009 as reported in Form D’s.

Not surprisingly, California came in first, followed by Massachusetts and Virginia. New York came in 6th, and interestingly if we treat Canada as a state it ranked 16th. See the top 20 below:

Top funded industries in 2009

We’ve been poring over 2009 Form D data over at SEC Watch - from highest to lowest, here are the ten industries receiving the most funding in 2009:

1. Commercial Banking ($9,373,199,228)
2. Other Healthcare ($5,135,703,164.00)
3. Other Technology ($3,919,266,738.00)
4. Investing ($3,550,524,332.00)
5. Insurance ($3,419,783,404.00)
6. REITs and Finance ($2,955,583,501.00)
7. Other Real Estate ($2,853,610,978.00)
8. Oil and Gas ($2,498,841,836.00)
9. Telecommunications ($2,464,536,845.00)
10. Manufacturing ($1,922,260,363.00)

Mar 13

All VC/Private Investment for Feb '10 in Excel Format -

Feel free to manipulate the data any way you see fit, check back for more updates!

Mar 04

February Private Equity Investments

Privately-held companies that raise capital are required to file a Form D with the SEC to declare exempt offering of securities. We created the map below using data from SEC Watch’s Research Platform for February Form D filings. Total values of investment are grouped by state and exclusive of pooled investment funds.

February Form D Investments by State

Mar 01

Impressive fundraising in the tech community - let’s hear it for New York!

New York privately-owned tech companies were second behind California for raising the most funding as reported in Form-D’s in February. Coming in at just over $150 million, funding went to 16 companies. As a New York-based startup ourselves, we thought they deserved a shout out.

Most companies who received funding are web-based startups, and Instant Information, Inc. raised the most with just under $120 million. Instant Information owns InfoNgen, a real-time discovery engine for business, finance, and information professionals. Other New York companies receiving funding included Yodle, a local online advertising provider, Fynanz, a private student lending platform, Energy Hub, which produces cost-effective energy management tools, and Tunesat, which tracks the use of music on broadcast television.

Also on the list: WebCollage, Kaltura, AlmondNet, Cellufun, Kamida (owner of Socialight), Magnify, Women on the Net, Really Simple, and Iconology.

Feb 23

Cyber attacks a hot topic in SEC filings

In light of Intel’s recent disclosure that they were the target of a cyber attack in January around the same time that Google was affected, we decided to see if this is a growing concern of companies.

We found that 9 companies used the phrase “cyber attack” in their 2009 disclosures, while 35 companies have already used this phrase in the first two months of 2010 - a marked increase.

While this search was by no means scientific, evidenced by Intel’s artful evasion of the term in their disclosure, it certainly says something. A recent 8-K from Google stated, ” Like many other well-known organizations, we face cyber attacks of varying degrees on a regular basis” and several 2010 filings we looked at reported a growing prevalence of attacks.