Want to know which industry sandboxes the venture capital firms are playing in? Then download a MoneyTree Report, a three-part match made in free-data heaven among PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association, and Thompson Reuters. Every quarter Thompson Reuters surveys the VC institutions on their cash-for-equity investments in growing private companies, and then PricewaterhouseCoopers packages the data with a neat bow and puts it online for the enjoyment of all.
You can download the most recent quarterly report which gives aggregate trends and analysis, and you can custom search historical data by factors including region, industry, financing sequence, etc. If you want data from the current quarter at the company-name level, the site prompts you to cough up your information on a registration page, but that seems like a small investment when considering the potential for information return.
P.S. It’s easy to overlook the News block at the bottom of the MoneyTree homepage, but it has a small selection of articles with exciting titles like, “US technology M&A insights 2011”.