Interesting perspectives and learnings could be gained by looking in to the funding activities around the start-up community.

If we look specifically at the start-up funding activities in US it is clear that the major part of the activity is around two cities specifically; San Francisco on the West coast and New York on the East coast. While there of course are activities in between, it is remarkably concentrated to these two cities. Biotechnology is clearly the largest vertical when it comes to start-up activities, both when measuring # of rounds, total funds raised and average funding / round. Interestingly enough the funding activities in Biotechnology seem to be somewhat more evenly spread in the country.

Another interesting observation is that if you single out companies with funding activities that eventually have been acquired, those are not primarily found in Biotechnology, but rather in the Software vertical.

Finally while Biotechnology seem to be the vertical with some heavy activities around start-up funding, it is also apparent that while number of rounds is significantly smaller the total funds raised and the average funding per round is significant also in Mobile and Clean Tech.

Go ahead and play around with the dataset yourself in the graph below; try for instance what happens if you only select cases between 1900 and 1950; how does that change the overall picture?

Source: CrunchBase