Innovation Investment Tracker | Week of July 11

Retail payments dominate this week, and data analytics and security, in particular, seemed to tickle the fancy of investors.

Here’s what happened the week ending July 11th

The Big Takeaways for Payments and Commerce

• $329 Million in financial activity was observed across a variety of investment types – VC funding, private placements, etc. Of that total, $247 Million was the driven by strategic or venture –backed investments the biggest transaction was debt financing for mBlox provided by Horizon Technology Finance for $43.5 Million.

• 74 percent of the fortnight’s activity was concentrated on the retail payments side. Of those, half them were in Data Analytics related to retail, shopping and commerce and Customer Acquisition & Loyalty. On the commercial payments side travel was the top category with 26% of investments.
• Venture backed and strategic investments on the retail payments side accounted for $169M of the total investment activity in the first fortnight of July. Of that, most was venture capital ($164 Million).
  
• Interestingly, most of the venture and strategic backed investments were in the data analytics and security areas accounting for 73 percent of the total. Authentication/biometrics ($ 7 Million), P2P ($1 Million), POS systems and prepaid reflected the least amount of investment activity.
  
• The most active VCs included Highland Capital Partners ($30 Million), Nokia Growth Partners ($30 Million) and Accel Partners ($21 Million).

  

• From a geographic perspective US was the most active region followed by Canada.

  

• The median investment amount was $6.9 Million.

The Retail and Commercial Payments Top 20
Here are the top 20 investments that drove 90 percent of the funding activity in the first two weeks of July 2014.