It all started with me trying to understand the funding scene in India and how companies are getting funded - at which stages, how much, from where and who are the primary investors. With this, the hunt for data started and culminated in the
Crunchbase Exports(as on 1-Apr-2014). The data was structured well, but OpenRefine was used to cleanup the data - cities with typo in their names and different cases were clustered into simple buckets. Other than this, no other manipulations were done. The data, for India, mainly starts off from Jan-2005(and ends at Mar-2014) and there are a total of 1150 records contains various details of the investments made. I do not think this is an exhaustive list, but it was a good start to looking into it and getting answers to some of my questions.
Lot of cool visualizations can be done to capture the various insights from the data, but I think histograms do a pretty good job and are readable to a vast majority. Lets proceed...
The first was to understand the spread of companies across cities, and without even thinking twice, Bangalore simply wins with the maximum number of companies. A slightly distant second is Delhi(this includes Noida, Gurgaon etc - if the details matter to the reader).
It is imperative to know the funding obtained across cities, and here too Bangalore wins with 4.6B$ and Delhi comes a close second at 4.4B$.
Fortunately, Crunchbase contains the details of the funding type and the other associated details. The spread of funding - as in, the type of funding and the count of it was an interesting thing to see and followed the expected patterns of Angel being in the top-slots.
But, it is important to know how much money do these different funding types bring to the table, and the patterns just got reversed with Angels going off from the top slots. I think, it would be extremely useful if Angel occupies the top-slots - this would signify that the startup ecosystem has no dearth for money and many startups are getting benefited due to angels; it is to be understood that the quantum of money involved in one particular round of Series-b(and above) is substantially more and is not to be compared with that of Angels.
The following chart would be useful as it superimposes the number of companies with a particular funding and the sum of the money raised in that type.
Probably, the following chart would best show the point above. It average money involved in a particular fundting type and shows the average and the maximum in such a category. Seriec-C+ has an average of 45M$ and the max is 200M$ (Tokyo's SoftBank investing in InMobi); whereas Private-Equity has an average of 49M$with a maximum of 300M$ (USA's Quadrangle Group in Tower Vision).
The top investors are listed in the below viz with Tiger Global Management(TGM) being in the first slot with 718M.
But the above number starts making more sense when the reader knows that TGM has invested only in 10 rounds whereas IDG ventures has invested in 48 rounds.
Half of the investments(7.5B$ out of the 14B$ invested since 2005) are primarily coming from USA, with India itself coming a close second and many other developed nations occupying the tail.
With the above, it is an added bonus if we known when the investments came in and does this have any bearing. Though I have not yet done any correlation of when the investments came in(i.e which quarter) and the eventual success of the company, it is interesting to observe the pattern in the following chart. Q1 clearly is the winner with the maximum funding and also the max companies getting it.
And finally, if that was a histogram(bar-chart) overdose, lets use a Sankey Diagram to visualize the money coming from different countries and flowing into companies situated in different cities in India. This graph is actually interactive and width of the arcs shows the amount of money involved in the funding round and clicking on it takes to details - but for the sake of this blog post, a screenshot of it should probably end this analysis.
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