As startup funding increases around the world, The Exchange has poked its head into markets as far-flung as Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. Wherever we looked, we’ve found venture capital flowing in record quantities.
The story has been largely the same inside the United States, with Boston having a solid year, along with the Midwest and Atlanta. Denver, our focus this morning, is similar.
After digging through recent venture capital data via PitchBook and CB Insights and talking to a few companies in the area, we discovered something notable: Venture capital results are rising in Denver after the city and its near-neighbor Boulder had attracted huge investment from the biggest technology companies.
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Let’s dig into Denver’s venture results, reminding ourselves as we do which companies set up shop in the region, as their presence initially drew in the workers who have since seeded the area with technology talent and capital..
A brief history lesson
If you read megatech earnings reports, you’ll sometimes get a look at how many folks work for the majors. It’s a lot of people. For example, Alphabet recently disclosed that it closed Q3 2021 with just over 150,000 employees, up from a few more than 132,000 in the year-ago quarter.
Denver has attracted more than a slice of interest from names like Microsoft, which has a long-standing presence in Boulder, about 40 miles away. Google dropped $131 million on a Boulder campus back in 2018, to add another nearby example to our list. (Some tech companies solve the commute issue between the two cities by operating offices in both loca …
