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Year in Review: Uber leads class of big-name venture deals

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A photo illustration shows the Uber app logo displayed on a mobile telephone, as it is held up for a posed photograph in central London, Britain October 28, 2016. REUTERS/Toby Melville/Illustration

As you might anticipate, the top 15 venture deals of 2016 include the big names you would expect from the canons of U.S. startups: Uber, Snapchat, Lyft and Airbnb.

However, the year’s big financings weren’t all about consumer and personal Internet. Two solar energy finance companies made the cut, as did a pair of biotechnology startups doing astonishing things with RNA and a database of human genomes.

So did a real estate site, an online news business, a food delivery service and two companies bringing efficiencies to group collaborations at work.

The year’s 15 top U.S. venture deals brought $10 billion of funding from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Felicis Ventures, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, GGV Capital, Norwest Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates, according to data from Thomson Reuters.

A pair of non-traditional investors, Fidelity Investments and Wellington Management Co, participated, as did corporates such as GV, GE Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Alibaba Caiptal Partners and Celgene Corp.

The biggest U.S. money raiser of the year by far was Uber, which received $3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and an additional $200 million from LetterOne Technology.

Snapchat raised $1.27 billion, according to Thomson Reuters, and Lyft collected $1 billion, with Alibaba and General Motors taking part.

Secretive virtual reality company Magic Leap is next on the list, followed by Airbnb and Modernatx, a biotech company making drugs using novel messenger mRNA technology.

Oscar Health Insurance brought in $400 million, with a lead from Fidelity, and both WeWork and Slack Technologies raised substantial rounds in the enterprise space.

Real estate marketplace OpenDoor raised $287 million, according to Thomson Reuters.

Overall, 2016 was a strong year, even if it is off 20 percent from the previous year, according to Thomson Reuters. The $45.6 billion invested in U.S.-based startups through mid-December, compared with more than $60 billion last year, is the third highest total since the dot-com bust.

More deal info is available in the attached spreadsheet.

Downloadable Data in Excel: top-companies-with-the-most-vc-raised-in-2016

Photo of the Uber app displayed on a mobile telephone, as it is held up for a posed photograph in central London, Oct. 28, 2016. Reuters/Toby Melville/Illustration