Ecosystem Dashboard – Funding

Funding is the fuel to make companies grow, expand and create more jobs.

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Many companies raise funds from the 3 Fs (friends, family & fools) and traditional sources like banks and credit unions.

But some companies, particularly those looking to scale quickly, require early-stage capital that is usually accepted in exchange for an equity stake in the company. This can be an important bellwether for the health of an ecosystem.

In this analysis, we used a proprietary database called Pitchbook to track the early-stage investing in Fort Worth-based companies and then compared it to other large Texas cities. We tracked all early-stage investments (that includes seed, angel and venture capital investments (Series A, B & C)).

companies based in the Fort Worth city raised an average of $17 million in early-stage funding from 2015-2020.

This chart shows the average number of transactions or “deals” done during the same period, compared to other large Texas cities.

Several of these cities have much larger populations than Fort Worth, so it would stand to reason that companies based in these other cities would see much more investment just due to their size.

To account for this, we adjusted for population and ranked these cities on a per capita basis.

An entrepreneur in Austin can expect to raise $702 per person, while an entrepreneur in Fort Worth can expect to raise $17.

But where does Fort Worth rank outside of Texas? How do some of these funding metrics stack up against other large US cities?

When ranked against the top 50 US cities by population, Fort Worth ranks 40th when it comes to early-stage capital raised. This puts Fort Worth closer to Albuquerque, New Mexico and Bakersfield, California, than it does to other larger Texas cities. We discuss this in more depth on our blog.

If we break out some of the specific funding categories, here is how Fort Worth ranks against the top 50 US cities.

Jobs

Funding

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Rankings