All the top five venture capital (VC) funded emerging technology companies in North America in 2018 were headquartered in California, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Among the top five, DoorDash, Open Door Labs and Lyft are in the digital business space. Growing demand for e-commerce, on-demand delivery services and ride sharing platforms has resulted in more VC money flowing into these areas.

Aurojyoti Bose, Financial Deals Analyst at GlobalData, comments: “With technology gaining prominence across sectors, we saw an emerging tech company catering to the construction sector, Katerra, finding place among the top five VC funded companies.”

Katerra raised US$999m, the highest VC funding among all companies during 2018. The company leverages building information modeling (BIM) tools, automation, robotics and computational technologies to develop architectural design of buildings and automate manufacturing operations.

Interestingly, three out of the top five companies – Katerra, Lyft and Snowflake Computing – also featured in Linkedin’s Top 50 Disruptors list released in September 2018.

DoorDash, Open Door Labs and Lyft, which operate in delivery services, online property selling and ride sharing services segments, respectively, collectively raised US$2bn during 2018.

Snowflake Computing, which secured third position in GlobalData’s list, raised US$713m. The company is active in cloud-based data-warehousing and analytics space.

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Of the total North American VC deals in the emerging tech space, American companies attracted more than 90% of the deal volume and deal value in 2018. Canada held distant second position with around 2.5% share in the total deal value and 5.5% in the deal volume.

Bose concludes: “The US has always been the capital for technological innovation or startups. The country’s supporting eco system makes it highly conducive for tech startups to choose the US for setting their operations. However, the US is not the only source for tech innovation within the region. Canada is also emerging as a tech hub with cities such as Toronto regarded by many as the next Silicon Valley in the making.”