How US Cities Compare in Startup Funding Per Capita

How do US cities compare in startup funding if you adjust for population rather than overall dollars?

Here's what we did:

1. Analyzed the top 20 metro areas in the US by total capital raised by startups on Carta in 2023. Each metro had to have at least 10 venture rounds in order to qualify.

2. Left hand list is ranked by total capital raised, right hand list is total capital per person (population figures taken from the 2020 census).

3. Made a couple choices about combining metro areas (in the Bay Area, for instance) and also not combining (should Denver and Boulder be lumped together? Possibly!)

I'll be upfront - not sure that per capita is an altogether useful metric for funding analysis. Obviously it can make smaller places pop up in the list and major metros fall.

It also brings up the question of what population metric matters. Should you look at the total number of people in a given metro area or the total number of people 𝗶𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽𝘀 in a place? Much harder to find that second number.

There is certainly something to the idea of startup density. It is a characteristic of the Bay Area that coffee shop conversation will center around tech, startups, and building new companies. One ingredient of many that makes building the next Silicon Valley a difficult challenge.

𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀

• Boulder jumps from 19th in total funding to 3rd in per capita funding. Also one of three cities to see over $1,000 invested per person into Carta startups, pretty cool.

• Cleveland also jumped up, from 15th to 9th. Mostly due to the outsize impact of one or two major rounds.

• Austin rose only slightly, but is very close to the $1,000 per person mark.

𝗙𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗿𝘀

• New York City drops from 3rd to 7th when you change the metric. Is that "fair"? I dunno! Lots of different industries vying for attention in NYC.

• LA drops from 4th to 8th.

• Chicago from 9th to 15th.

The Bay and Boston both hold steady at 1 and 2 respectively, no matter which set of numbers you use. The Bay Area also is the only location where startup funding per person crests over $2,000.

Is per capita funding a valuable stat to track moving forward or should we stick to overall dollars?

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