Menu Icon
Refresh Miami Logo
Search Icon
Sign Up Sign In

BOOM! Miami metro hauls in $5.5B in VC in 2022, a new record, Pitchbook reports

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
PinLinkedIn

By Nancy Dahlberg

Founders and funders continued to flock to the Miami area in 2022, growing the ecosystem – and helping put Miami on the map for venture capital. While other large metros and top tech hubs lost a lot of ground, Miami gained.

Now solidly in the top 10 US metros for venture capital, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro area   logged $5.5 billion in in 2022 across 423 deals, according to the Q4 2022 PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.  This is a new record at a time when larger tech hubs are seeing to 25% to 40% decreases. We also saw 11.6% more deals than last year, whereas New York for instance saw a 15% drop in deals. The report was  jointly produced by PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. 

For 2022, the Miami metro ranks 8th in the nation, behind the Bay Area, New York, LA, Boston, Chicago, Seattle and Philadelphia, and ahead of Austin and Washington DC, according to the Venture Monitor’s graphic. The Bay Area still grabbed 31.8% of the deal dollars nationally, but it was the lowest level since 2012.

According to Pitchbook’s reporting, the total deal value flowing into companies in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area (Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties) was up 15% from the year before. The Q4 deal value total was anemic, just $369.6 million, down 74% from the quarter before, but strength in the first three quarters pulled the region through. According to my analysis for eMerge Americas, Pitchbook’s VC 2022 tally of $5.5 billion is up 1.5% over 2021’s record smashing total $5.33 billion. I am still completing my analysis for my comprehensive year-end report, and according to my preliminary calculations, I expect the 2022 total for the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro will be close to what Pitchbook reported, but my analysis will go deeper into our metro area. Stay tuned.

Indeed, Miami has come a long way. The region began to make big moves with a three-year run from  2018 through 2020 when South Florida companies attracted $6.5 billion of venture capital, more than the seven previous years combined, according to my research. But in 2021, powered by the Miami Movement, a healthy number of homegrown players reaching later stage rounds, and a Q4 2021 surge in crypto-related investments, the Miami metro area more finally broke out and continued to grow in 2022, packing on another record year for dollars and deals.

In 2022, the top deals were Yuga Labs’ $450 million raise and Flow’s haul of $350 million. Other big gainers included Recurrent Ventures ($300M);  Muck Rack ($180M); Material Bank ($175M), PayCargo ($130M) and Novo ($125M in two tranches). All but two of these companies relocated to Miami in the last couple of years.

In 2022, fund-raising by VC firms also was a bright spot for South Florida, with VC fundraising hitting $5.07 billion, up from $497 million 2021, according to Pitchbook. In Q4 that was led by Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six.

Any way you slice it – it was a momentous year for South Florida VC – especially amid recessionary headwinds, a global VC slowdown, mounting tech layoffs, the FTX implosion and a crypto winter. But it’s far from perfect: Investments into women-founded startups locally even lag the dismal national average. While I don’t have good data locally for Black-founded startups, we know that nationally their share of fundings is in the low single-digits.

In South Florida, exits fell from $3.5 billion in 2021 to $2.1 billion in 2022, led by Technisys’s acquisition.

Statewide, Florida also recorded a record year, with $6.81 billion across 661 deals, up from $6.63 billion across 671 deals in 2021, according to the Venture Monitor. South Florida’s share accounted for 81% of the dollars and 63% of the deals.

Nationally, deal value plunged from $344 billion to $238 billion – a 31% plunge year-over-year. The number of deals fell from 18,521 to 15,852. To be sure, slowing momentum was 2022’s primary narrative in the VC industry. One of the most striking indicators was the lethargic pace of exits, with just $71.4 billion in total exit value generated, which is a 90.5% decline from 2021’s record of $753.2 billion and the first time this figure has dipped below $100 billion since 2016.

“Although earlier stage deal activity and fundraising totals show remarkable resiliency in 2022, the overall slowdown in annual VC activity reflects the sizable headwinds presented by ongoing macroeconomic factors, rising interest rates and frozen avenues for startup liquidity,” said Pitchbook founder and CEO John Gabbert, commenting on the national VC results. “Unable to justify the sky-high valuations seen in 2021 and retreating from the ‘growth-at-all-costs’ mindset seen in recent years, many investors are pulling back until the ecosystem returns to a more palatable normal.”

Looking ahead to 2023, Pitchbook  projects a decline in startup funding activity due to public markets uncertainty and recessionary headwinds, though it forecasts a strong year for early-stage investment deals. 

According to Pitchbook’s 2023 Outlook, deal sizes and valuations for seed-stage startups will grow in 2023; in South Florida, nearly a third of our deals are seed stage. The median size of these investment deals last year hit a record high of $2.8 million, with the median company valuation also at a record high: $10.5 million. 

Click HERE to download the Venture Monitor report.

Stay tuned for my comprehensive annual VC report in eMerge Americas’ spring magazine. We’ll break down the trends in our region’s largest sectors of fintech, healthtech and crypto, see what other sectors are emerging, where the Crypto Capital stands, the hard truth about funding into female-founded startups, and much more.   

Source: Venture Monitor. NOTE: According to Pitchbook, the Miami numbers cited in this graphic are for the CSA that includes Miami, which is a slightly wider region than the tri-county area.

READ MORE ON REFRESH MIAMI:

Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]

Nancy Dahlberg
Latest posts by Nancy Dahlberg (see all)