Biotech venture data and the XBI index measure different companies

The record

Crunchbase News reported on 9 July 2024 that in the second quarter of 2024, healthcare and biotech was the second-largest venture funding sector, raising $17 billion, behind artificial intelligence's $24 billion, or 30 percent of all dollars invested that quarter. Separately, State Street's fund page for the SPDR S&P Biotech ETF, retrieved 16 September 2026, describes the fund's benchmark, the S&P Biotechnology Select Industry Index, as a modified equal-weighted index within the S&P Total Market Index; as of 31 August 2026 the fund's one-year return was 81.70 percent and its year-to-date return 33.41 percent.

What the sources establish

Crunchbase's figure counts private funding rounds into companies it tags under a combined healthcare-and-biotech category. The XBI index counts publicly listed biotechnology companies only, weighted equally across large, mid and small capitalisation rather than by market value, which the fund page says is designed to give unconcentrated exposure across company sizes. The Biotechnology Innovation Organization's homepage, retrieved 16 September 2026, describes its members more broadly still: companies developing medical and scientific breakthroughs, ranging from early start-ups to large biopharmaceutical firms, across more than 35 countries.

Scope and revision

Three sources, three different populations under one label. Crunchbase's number spans private companies of any size that raised a round in a quarter. The index spans public companies selected and equally weighted under S&P's rules, which can overweight small companies relative to a market-cap index. BIO's description spans the whole industry, private and public, without a stage or size boundary. None of the retrieved documents states a causal relationship between public biotech share performance and private biotech venture funding, and none should be inferred from the figures alone.

The decision in front of you

An analyst who wants to use public biotech performance as a signal for private biotech funding conditions should first confirm the two series cover matching time windows and comparable company populations before treating a move in one as informative about the other. Editorially, that comparison is a hypothesis to test with the cited data, not a conclusion the data already states.

• Does the biotech figure include only public companies, only private companies, or both?
• Is the index equal-weighted or market-cap weighted, and over what period?
• Is a stated correlation actually documented, or assumed from two separate figures?

Biotech venture funding, a public biotech index, and an industry association's membership all use the word biotech, and each draws its own boundary around a different set of companies.