FORTUNE — Every couple of months, some New York-based journalist talks to New York-based venture capitalists about how New York is threatening Silicon Valley for America’s technology crown. After seeing another one of these yesterday, I decided it was worth learning if the data matches the anecdotal boasts. In short, it does not.
So I tweeted out my top-line findings, which was that venture capitalists invested $12 billion into Silicon Valley companies last year, compared to just $2.3 billion into New York companies. I thought this would have settled matters, but then some folks started to quibble. For example, perhaps the numbers were skewed by the inclusion of healthcare deals (of which New York has relatively few). Or that Silicon Valley’s results were inflated by big money late-stage fundings, whereas New York is leading on smaller seed-stage deals. And was I counting the outer boroughs?
Sigh. What follows is MoneyTree data for 2012 investments into “information technology” companies, courtesy of the National Venture Capital Association. No healthcare included. I’ve also opted for regional data, broken out as Silicon Valley, New York Tri-State (NY, NJ, CT) and New England (just for the sake of comparison):
- New York Tri-State: 322 deals for $1.78 billion
186 deals classified as seed or early-stage, raising $580.37 million ($3.12m avg) - New England: 252 deals raising $1.5 billion
121 deals classified as seed or early-stage, raising $558.64 million ($4.6m avg) - Silicon Valley: 892 deals raising $7.95 billion
492 deals classified as seed or early-stage, raising $2.47 billion ($5.01 m avg)
In other words, Silicon Valley needn’t be looking over its shoulder…
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