This morning, the folks at Dow Jones VentureSource confirmed (only at a high-level) what the numbers we had already put out were saying for Q2 ‘09 venture capital activity.  Their numbers have still not been issued as their process/methodology differs from ours, but specifically, they talked about healthcare investments being ‘healthy’ in Q2 which we can confirm as evidenced by 37% of the $5.329B in VC investment in the quarter going to healthcare startups (we reported this a few days ago).

We think the quarter offers numerous interesting storylines in addition to the healthcare investment trend.  Most obvious is the 61% jump quarter over quarter in overall venture capital funding activity.  Another surrounds the conventional wisdom that venture capital firms would invest more fortifying existing portfolio companies versus making investments in new companies.  As we already discussed, early-stage investment in the quarter was healthy especially in internet startups which actually saw an uptick in activity over Q1.

So what was the mix of deals broken down by early stage versus follow-on or later stage investments?  The numbers are below for five of the most prominent sectors VCs invest in.  While follow-on and later stage investments were significant and levels did vary by sector (tech and healthcare saw more), across the board, we see again that early stage deals are being done.