We still have four months to go, but we already know this will be a transformational year for venture capital investment in South Florida.
eMerge Insights, a biannual venture capital report released today by eMerge Americas (full disclosure: I authored the report), puts numbers behind that bold statement. Through June 30, $1.54 billion was invested in 60 startups and later-stage companies in South Florida. That’s already more than the $1.38 billion invested in all of 2018 — ”and we are just getting started,” said Felice Gorordo, CEO of eMerge Americas, the organization behind the annual conference as well as a number of ecosystem-building initiatives.
“We always envisioned Miami would be a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity, and we now have the comparative data to trace how much this ecosystem has evolved and the transformational impact we are making as a community,” added Melissa Medina, president of eMerge Americas.
To be sure, there are two mega-reasons for that outsized $1.54 billion number: an estimated $900 million round into the SoftBank-backed REEF Technology (formerly ParkJockey), a real estate technology startup, and $280 million that flowed into spatial computing company Magic Leap. Still, thanks in large part to those rounds, the Miami metro area ranked 7th in the nation. Read More