Most Popular Orange County Capital Investment Sectors

Which Orange County industries are receiving the most capital investment in recent years?

PriceWaterhouseCoopers and CB Insights recently shared their quarterly MoneyTree report.  It included interesting numbers quantifying the local Orange County startup funding environment.

The slide below shows the favorite investing sectors for Orange County capital investors in 2015-2017.  

 Source: PWC/CB Insights MoneyTree Report.

The leading vertical for investments in Orange County was SAAS companies with 71 deals for $648 million. 

Not too surprisingly, Orange County SAAS startup investments are followed by Life Sciences with 53 deals totaling $475 million in the same period. 

Then come manufacturing, followed by more “startupy” sectors including FinTech, Cybersecurity, Mobile, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and more.

The other columns of bar graphs comparing Orange County to other regions of California and their most active investment sectors is interesting, too. 

Anyone have more recent numbers that we can share also?  Or critiques of these numbers or PWC’s methodology?