PhillyDeals: First Round Capital ranks high in number of deals

First Round Capital, the West Conshohocken venture-capital firm, was the third-largest venture-capital investor in the United States over the last year, as measured by the number of deals.

The firm is directed by Josh Kopelman, the founder and seller of Infonautics, half.com, and TurnTide, and his comrade Chris Fralic, along with their

West Coast and New York partners. First Round's performance was tracked by both CB Insights and the PricewaterhouseCoopers MoneyTree surveys.

First Round averaged a deal a week, more than Sequoia Capital or Benchmark Capital, and almost as many as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among other big Silicon Valley firms.

But the MoneyTree data also show First Round buys much smaller pieces of risky new companies, averaging $1 million per deal vs. typical

infusions of $5 million to $10 million and up for the big firms.

"We are first-round," a "seed-stage" investor in early-stage companies, says Fralic, who scored when Google Inc. paid a reported $81 million for Philadelphia-founded, First Round- and Comcast-backed Invite Media earlier this summer.

Other active Philadelphia-area venture firms include Quaker BioVentures Inc., which did 15 deals worth $66 million over the last year, according to Money Tree; the venture-capital divisions of SAP Americas, and suburban investors Osage Partners L.L.C., SCP Private Equity Partners, and NewSpring Capital, each of which did deals worth at least $25 million from last July through June.

Out in Exton's Oaklands corporate center, in the middle of Chester County, the former Brandywine Realty Trust office building at 479 Thomas Jones Way has been sold for just $3.75 million, or $75 a square foot.

That's down from Brandywine's earlier asking price of $6.25 million, a price left over from the real estate bubble of the mid-2000s.

Cheap space makes it hard to justify new construction projects. But it is attractive to bargain-hunting investors such as #479's new owner, Dunn Twiggar Co. L.L.C., of Bethlehem.

Principal Ryan Dunn told me the price, less than half the cost of a new building, "represents the current market conditions for sales and purchase to actually occur, and close."

Still, some tenants in search of first-class space remain willing to pay respectable prices, Daniel C. Dagit Jr., senior vice president at CB Richard Ellis in Valley Forge, said.

He pointed to Citadel Federal Credit Union's $13 million purchase of an 84,000-square- foot headquarters in the Eagleview corporate center. That works out to just over $150 a square foot, double what Dunn paid and closer to what a new building would cost.

It's a good time to be an investor such as Dunn, with prices sagging. But high-end buyers such as Citadel are still out there, giving builders hope, Dagit said.

The Pittsburgh-based American Cable Association, representing 900 small cable-TV operators, last week asked the Federal Communications Commission to set some conditions before approving Comcast's planned purchase of NBC Universal and its TV networks and channels.

ACA wants Comcast to sell its video and sports networks to cable systems one at a time, and not "bundled" together. Also, it seeks "baseball-style" arbitration to settle fee disputes more quickly, and the extension of FCC access rules to online and mobile services, among other steps.

Those conditions might "change the way the TV industry negotiates" with cable, but would not "be a deal-breaker," writes David C. Joyce, analyst at Miller Tabak + Co. in New York.

"The timing of the potential deal approval would appear to have shifted out" to early next year, or later, Joyce added. Comcast originally hoped to get the deal done this year, but FCC's "review process could get more involved" if the cable association's proposals "are viewed to have wider-ranging implications," Joyce added.

Carol Baldwin Moody, like her daughter, is a graduate of Germantown Friends School. In Tuesday's item about Baldwin Moody's new role at Wilmington Trust Co., I linked them to the wrong high school.