In a culmination of previous trends, this year's ranking of academic spinouts on the basis of venture capital A rounds in 2016 resulted in a list exclusively of firms based in the United States. Recognizing that innovation is global, we have also listed in Table 1 two top-capitalized startups from Europe and Asia. Overall, US biopharma startups dwarf firms from other areas in terms of capitalization and number (Fig. 1); Ireland and the UK are punching above their weight; European companies continue to be comparatively undercapitalized. Those few biotech firms started in China were funded exceptionally well (Table 2).

Table 1 Top ten A rounds in 2016 for innovative academic startups (as of Dec. 15)
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Figure 1: Number of startups by country in 2016.
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A-2 rounds, and rounds of undisclosed amounts, left out. NA, not applicable. Source: BCIQ: BioCentury Online Intelligence

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Table 2 Total and average A-round amounts by country in 2016
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