Early Stage Investments in Tarrant County at the Municipal Level

In this blog we’re going to take a look at all the early stage investment deals in Tarrant County since 2015, including a breakdown at the individual municipality (town or city) level.

While most of our prior data-heavy blog posts have focused on Fort Worth as a city and how it compares to fellow Texas cities, this time around we wanted to look locally, at the greater Fort Worth area: Tarrant County. There are 41 Tarrant County municipalities stretching from Keller, to White Settlement, to Burleson, to Arlington, and everywhere in between. Tarrant County’s estimated 2020 population is 2,139,860, which ranks as the third most populous county in Texas and the fifteenth largest in the entire United States.

According to PitchBook, Tarrant County raised a combined $226,351,000 in Early Stage Capital (Early Stage Capital includes Seed, Angel and Early Stage VC (Series A, B, C & round not disclosed)) from 2015 to now, for an average of nearly $38 million per year. As for the deal count, companies based in Tarrant County received capital in 108 deals since 2015, for an average of 18 deals per year.


When you begin to take a closer look at the numbers, some of the data may surprise you. As you might expect, Fort Worth leads the way in funding and deal count. But take a look at Southlake, Westlake, and Colleyville. Those cities make up 3 of the 4 smallest cities who had any early stage funding data, and yet they’re ahead of nearly half the cities in terms of funding and deal count.


As we continue to break down the numbers, more interesting trends appear. Because a few of these cities have relatively large amounts of funding coupled with smaller total deals, their average funding per deal is quite large.

When we look at funding relative to population, the numbers paint another interesting picture. Startups in several of these smaller cities have managed to raise a fair amount of capital. On a per capita basis, these cities are punching far above their weight in financing their local startup companies. If you live in Southlake, you can expect to get $325 to start your company, and nearly $250 for residents of Westlake.

Given today’s political, social, and economic climate, it’s more important than ever to come together as a community. We as a county and a city must be willing to stack hands and come together in order to seize our full potential for prosperity via the avenue of entrepreneurship. It might sound overly dramatic, but startups and entrepreneurs have been catalysts for positive impact and change for generations. If we take another look at the numbers, we see that there is an obvious innovative and entrepreneurial spirit in Tarrant County. The data tells us that good ideas live everywhere, not just in the big cities.

Any local entrepreneur with an idea and a passion should be encouraged to go for it, knowing that they will have the full support of an entire county behind them. We are all on the same team here, and we’re all connected, whether we like it or not. A company headquartered in Grapevine might have employees who live in Arlington but send their kids to school in Fort Worth and enjoy shopping and dining in Keller. They say it takes a village to raise a child. Although Tarrant County might be slightly larger than a village, the saying still rings true- if we want a vibrant entrepreneurial landscape, Tarrant County as a whole needs to work together, with each person and city offering the best of their talents and skills.

 

Want to learn more about getting connected with the local entrepreneurial community? Check out Sparkyard’s Resource Navigator.

Interested in seeing more stats on the Fort Worth entrepreneurial ecosystem? Click here to view other data related posts.

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