The venture capital industry has been debating the trend towards the "private IPO" in recent quarters. "Private IPOs" are becoming increasingly prevalent as the preferred financing route for mature start-ups. Tomasz Tunguz, a venture capitalist, shared some interesting data earlier this year that highlighted this trend, which took off during 2014. For example, last year there were 211 rounds of growth financing (+$40 million) for startups across 251 working days. In comparison, there were only 15 venture-backed IPOs over the same period. Private market IPOs were 14x as common as public IPOs in 2014. For full-year 2014, $65.1 billion was raised through "private IPOs" (private financing deals) while the dollar value of venture capital backed public offerings only amounted to $10.6 billion. During the first half of 2015, $38.8 billion was raised through "private IPOs" compared to $3.5 billion for public offerings. These figures may suggest that the venture capital-backed public IPO market is struggling, but public IPO activity isn’t as... More