Utah-based Kickstart Seed Fund Raises $39.2 Million

Early stage venture capital investors Kickstart Seed Fund announced today that it has raised a $39.2 million investment round from various Utah investors. This is the third round for the seed fund and one of the larger rounds in Utah venture capital history.
The Utah-based firm typically invests $500,000-$1 million rounds of capital in local startups. Much of this is in the enterprise software category, though some investments, like amiigo and cotopaxi are more consumer-based.
Kickstart is just one part of the state’s investor ecosystem. According to a Dow Jones report, the much larger Utah VC firm Sorenson Capital is on track to raising $400 million.
The new funds will give Kickstart the opportunity to invest larger amounts and possibly get into some Series A investments. “We’ve considered that,” says Kickstart founder Gavin Christensen.
Approximately $737 million was poured into startups within Utah’s Wasatch Front area last year, according to the Associated Press. CBInsights marked total funding at nearly $1 billion from Q1 2013 to Q3 2014 in the state.

This also puts Utah on the map for one of the top places for startups to raise money. The Provo-Orem area of Utah comes in at number 8 and Salt Lake City checks in at number 12 on the list of the top 20 U.S. cities to raise money.
However, dollar-per-deal averages are a different story. The Provo-Orem area of Utah is number one in the country for the largest per deal sums of money, with an average of $51.3 million per deal. To put this into perspective, that’s twice the dollar-per-deal in Silicon Valley. San Francisco ranks at number 2 with $18.4 million per deal.
However, some of what’s driving up the Utah average are a few much larger investments in companies like Domo, Qualtrics and PluralSight.
Kickstart has raised a total of $73.2 million since its start in 2008. It has poured $28 million in funding into 65 companies thus far.