Today, ATDC celebrated a very important milestone for the southeast and Georgia in particular. ATDC celebrated the fact that its companies had raised over $1 BILLION dollars in venture capital financing. And, Tony Antoniades, General Manager of ATDC, reminded us many times throughout the event just how big $1B really is:

• You’d have to spend $22M every minute for the entire ceremony to spend $1B.
• You’d have to eat a Varsity lunch every minute for the next 10 years.
• You’d have to combine the highest grossing revenue movies of all times - Titanic ($600M) and Star Wars ($400) - to get $1B.
• You’d have enough money to buy everyone in Atlanta an iPod nano with $1B.

One billion dollars is quite a significant amount of capital invested in startup and emerging growth companies - and those are all ATDC companies. By the numbers, that’s 160 deals in 75 companies from 138 venture investors. The average deal size is $6.7M for each ATDC company.

Deal makeup stats:

76% software
16% communications
2% life sciences
2% hardware

Interestingly enough, many people think that ATDC is only about Georgia Tech. However, 76% of the ATDC companies have had no affiliation with Georgia Tech. Only 24% have had a GT affiliation.

32 of the companies raised from $0-5M. Only 10 companies have raised more than $25M.

Top deals in 2006. Air2Web came in at $25M and Cardiomems just behind them at $22.5M. Jacket Micro Devices raised $12M and iVivity $10M.

ATDC represents a significant portion of all investments in the State of Georgia with 21%. The remaining 79% of state investments are non-ATDC affiliations.

2 Major firms sponsored the event today: DLA Piper and HIG Capital.

DLA Piper is an elite technology venture law firm. They’re helping companies secure capital as well as structure their growth. DLA Piper ranks #3 in venture deal volume - with #1 being Wilson Sonsini and #2 being Cooley Godward.

DLA Piper did 246 venture deals in 2005; 397 deals were done in 2006. Of the top firms, DLA Piper is the only firm currently that has a presence in the Southeast U.S. Of their deals, GA ranked #3 with 8 deals behind Boston with 7 and California with 13. Interestingly enough, Jeffrey Leavitt of DLA Piper reported that Noro-Moseley toped the GA investments with 7 deals in Georgia.

HIG Capital is an early to growth stage venture fund out of Miami, FL that has an Atlanta office. HIG Capital has $4B of total capital under management with investors such as Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, MIT, Morgan Stanley, Stanford, Verizon and Yale University.

HIG has around 100 investment professional and has invested $50M in 7 ATDC companies. Their latest fund of $300M. HIG is a strong partner of ATDC and has only invested in 1 non-ATDC venture. From Fred Sturgis‘ perspective, “ATDC is the crown jewel of the souteast from a technology investor perspective because of the marriage of tech & commercilization”. Fred said that ATDC “is a hub of bringing capital into the region”. With $1B raised in its companies since its inception, that’s apparent.

ATDC has also had a dramatic economic impact for the State of Georgia by contributing $12.7B in revenue and has contributed 52,000 employment years. The State of Georgia has yielded $100M in profit from ATDC companies. The goal of ATDC is to “increase the technology business base in Georgia by helping entrepreneurs launch and build successful companies.”

• Consulting - strategic business advise
• Community - interaction with other entrepreneurs
• Connections - connections to people and resources
• Centre - facilities designed for startups
• Credibility - instant recognition

ATDC today also announced it’s new venture catalysts:

Lance Weatherby (ex-Mindspring and Cipertrust) - Atlanta
Jason Burr - Savannah

ATDC also has a strong Enterpreneur-in-Residence program which helps facilitate the collaboration of startups and seasoned enterpreneurs.

Ron Curtis (founder of Webtone) and Jeff Hoffman (founder of Priceline) are the current EIR. Interestingly enough, two-thirds of EIRs join or start ATDC companies.

This year’s ATDC champions included:

• Gordon Eilen - for establishing CTO roundtables
• Joan Herbig - from Cambia, taught workshops for entrepreneurs
• HIG ventures/Fred Sturgis - for publishing, speaking and venture whitepapers
• Jeffrey Leavitt - DLJ Piper
• Mike Slawson - Venture Lab Fellow
• Jim Stratigos - for being the poster child for entrepreneur at ATDC - famous quote: “Jim is the Paris Hilton of ATDC”. (lots of laughs)

And speaking of clapping, it would take the entire room to clap straight for 16 days to total one billion claps. With a $1B, you could give every website in the world $10.

Tony announced what was on the horizon for ATDC:

• Extend the impact - they announced an entrepreneurship blog which will launch in the summer
• Capital readiness workshops
• An offering for non-tenants - possibly a north metro offering for all of us who don’t like driving all the way downtown. Yea!

The ATDC advisory council:

• Bird Blitch
• Wain Kellum
• Darryl Lemecha
• Said Mohammadioun
• Emma Morris
• Sig Mosley
• David Stern

And, now - on to the graduates. The graduates were split up into 2 categories: Venture Lab graduates and ATDC graduates.

Venture Lab is run by Stephen Fleming and the goal is to start successful companies based on GT research. It’s been around for five years and Stephen says that “if ATDC is an incubator, Venture Lab is neo-natal care.” Much of the available pre-seed funding available through the Georgia Research Alliance.

Some of the prior Venture Lab graduates have included CardioMems, Nuventix, GTronix, Orthonics, JMD, QCept, Stheno, Radatec, Virtual Aerosurface Technologies.

Today’s Venture Lab Grads:

Asankya, Scott Ryan CEO
Asankya is enabling high-quality real-time content.

Damballa, Steve Linowes, CEO
Addressing threats that are compromising the foundation of the Internet (bot armies).
Stephen said that Damballa “made 6 VC pitches and received 5 term sheets”. Wow - that’s impressive - and quite un-natural.

Innovolt, Suresh Sharma, CEO
Complete Power Protection for all electronics. Current surge suppression instead of the existing volt surge suppression products.

Medshape Solutions, Kurt Jacobus
Better health through better materials. A bio medical startup focused on memory polymers.

Sentrinsic, Mike Orndorff, CEO
Position sensors for use in industrial automation, robotics and aerospace applications.

Vivonetics, Gang Bao, CEO
Applying beacon technology for health and life sciences.
Vivonetics is the newest ATDC company.

WiSPI.net, Dave Kelly
Companies tagline: “Batteries are cheap. Replacing them isn’t.”
Micro scale fuel cells - size of the tip of your finger.

And, the ATDC graduating class of 2007:

Cambia
Founder was member of elite XForce Team from ISS

FTrans
70 customers including Synovous
Raised $7M

Jacket Micro Devices (JMD)
4 patents granted, 25 pending
Based on early Army research grant
Packs RF components into a very small chip
Tony noted: “one billion JMD chips stacked back to back will stretch from Atlanta to California and back.”

QCept
6 months to get their first patent award (wow, that’s very fast!)
chemical inspection for semiconductor industry

Racemi
$10M raised in total
Racemi was a company that struggled and survived the 9/11 hard times when very few companies could raise money.
Co-founded by Paul Freet and now has 26 employees.

ScanTech
2 U.S. spies found interesting technology in Russia and licensed it after the Cold War
Received Homeland Defense award for “best innovative solution” in the U.S.

Tony outlined some of the ATDC learnings that are expressed in it’s graduate lineup:

• world events / macroeconomics - such as 9/11 and Iraq War - provide both opportunities and present chaos for all companies

• near death experiences - some companies were on the virtual collapse and navigated through it

• takes longer than expected - each company experienced longer than they expected to turn a profit, raise money and produce their product

All-in-all I thought the event was very enlightening and encouraging to see so many interesting companies doing a variety of different market segments.

The “official presentations” from Tony are below:

- ATDC Ceremony Presentation
- Venture Lab Presentation
- Gold Sponsors: DLA Piper and HIG Capital Presentation
* Thanks for Mike Schinkel for the nice photos.

technorati tags: atdc, georgia, venturecapital, vc, entrepreneur, atlanta