Where To Get Funded In 2016 That Isn't Silicon Valley (Press Release)

Entrepreneurs and investors both know that, for better and worse, the San Francisco Bay Area is the top dog in basically everyone’s rankings of startup hubs. Its history as the cradle of the consumer computer age, present as the home of lots and lots of “unicorns” and penchant for wearing startup-branded hoodies and bringing dogs to the office all make it a lovely and dynamic place to start a company.

But, it’s also foggy and heinously expensive.

For those entrepreneurs and investors who either can’t, or do not want to be based in the Bay Area, the question begs to be asked: Which other hubs of investment activity stand out from the crowd? Which startup hubs performed the best in 2015 relative to the previous few years? In order to answer these questions, we pulled Mattermark’s deal information from over 6,700 Angel, Seed, Series A and Series B investments made in over 4,900 companies based in sixteen different US cities between January 1, 2012 and December 31, 2015.

Our main interest is upward momentum in investing activity over the past two years. But, again, to suss out some useful information from the data, the playing field needs to be leveled.

To do this, we normalized all of the cities deal information for each year to the total dealmaking activity in that city over the course of four years. In plain English, if a city experienced no change in investment activity, its adjusted activity score would be 25 in 2012, ‘13, ‘14, and ‘15. Here is a (somewhat busy) chart identifying the top startup cities that gained the most steam in recent years.

Below, we ranked the cities to identify which cities had the most investment activity in 2015 relative to the previous year. Instead of showing all 17 cities, we show the top 10, plus the Bay Area and the average of all cities we analyzed.

Read the rest of the article and get more info here.