Follow the Money: Boston Tech and Fintech, 2010 to 2026

Where has venture and growth capital in the Boston area tech and fintech market gone since 2010, and who controls it? These are the first three questions an analyst at a fund or a corporate development team would ask: when did capital peak, which sectors attract it, and which investors write the cheques that matter.

• 197 deals across 60 companies and 28 lead investors, 2010 to 2026, worth $8.5B in total deal value.
• Three tables shaped like a PitchBook export: companies, investors and a deal level fact table.
• The dataset is fictional sample data that mirrors PitchBook's field structure. No licensed data is used.

1. Modelled the workbook as a star schema: one deal fact table joined to company and investor dimensions. See the model.
2. Flattened the model into one analysis table for Tableau.
3. Added four derived fields. Capital Type splits funding rounds from M&A exits, which turned out to be the most important step. Stage Order sorts rounds from Seed to exit. Step Up is each round's post money valuation divided by the previous one. Era groups years into Build, Boom and Reset.
4. Reconciled every Tableau total against an independent Python check before publishing.

1. Exits made 2021 look like the peak. New funding actually peaked in 2024. 2021 had the largest total deal value ($1.36B), but about $780M of it came from acquisitions. Funding rounds alone peaked in 2024 at $745M, around 30% above 2021.
2. Cybersecurity leads, and dominates exits. It accounts for 35% of all deal value and is still first at 23% with exits removed. It produced 6 of the 13 acquisitions and over half of all exit value.
3. The funnel narrows by roughly 40% at each stage. 58 Series A rounds fall to 37 Series B, 23 Series C and 13 Series D.
4. Valuation step ups shrink as companies mature. The median Series A prices at 3.6x the previous round, falling to 2.6x at Series B and about 1.8x at Series C and D.
5. VCs do most of the deals, but others write the big cheques. Venture capital firms led 70% of deals but only 29% of the dollars. Corporate venture and PE firms led 17% of deals but over half of the value.

For an investor, a headline "capital invested" figure mixes two very different things. Separating funding from exits changes which year looks strongest and where the liquidity really is. For a founder, the step up data argues for raising efficiently early, because valuation momentum fades quickly after Series B.

• Add time to exit and capital efficiency (exit value divided by total raised) per company. I did this in the Power BI project.
• Credit co-investors as well as the lead. Right now the full deal value is attributed to the lead investor.
• Run the same analysis on real public data, for example SEC Form D filings.