Between that date and today, Fisker Automotive would create perhaps the most beautiful car ever made, raise almost $1.4 billion dollars from investors as diverse as Leonardo di Caprio and Kleiner Perkins, obtain a $528 million loan from the U.S. Department of Energy, balloon to 600+ employees, default on loans or investment conditions at least four separate times, spend $535,000 on a website, get sued by its own employees, get evicted from its primary business location, and be investigated by the government — apparently for its incredible ability to burn a billion dollars while delivering only a few thousand actual completed cars.

What a wild, crazy ride it’s been.

“Fisker spent a stunning $900,000 for each vehicle it produced,” PrivCo chief executive Sam Hamadeh told me. “Then they sold them to dealers for an invoice price of just $70,000.”

PrivCo, a research firm focused on non-public companies, has compiled an exhaustive dossier on Fisker, its cash, its commitments, and its massive failure to produce anything like a functional, profitable business. While burning through $1.4 billion dollars, Fisker produced fewer than 2,200 cars, PrivCo data shows, 600 of which remain unsold on dealers’ lots. And 1,200 investors, which include university endowment funds and company pension plans, are learning that their cash has been completely wiped out.

Even worse?

The government was grossly negligent in its issuing of the Fisker loan, Hamadeh maintains, saying that Fisker is the biggest public loss since the infamous Solyndra Solar debacle, which cost the government as much as half billion dollars. Not only did the U.S. Department of Energy apply “negligent underwriting standards” in granting the Fisker loans, it also failed to enforce the loan conditions as Fisker breached the loan terms, PrivCo says. That failure cost the U.S. taxpayer an extra $192.3 million.

That’s bad enough. But sadly, it gets even worse.

Even as Fisker continued private fundraising efforts, when the DOE privately issued a Drawdown Stop Notice to halt payments to the stumbling car company, it failed to warn future investors that Fisker was in default. As PrivCo writes in its report:

U.S. Department of Energy made no announcement to the public that Fisker was in Default of Its Loan and Credit Agreements and no longer had access to the remaining balance of $336.4 Million, resulting in continued reliance on hundreds of additional individual investors purchasing Fisker stock in the hundreds of millions of dollars through the Advanced Equities “Fisker Funds” limited partnerships as well as reliance on that reasonable assumption that Fisker had continued and substantial access to the remaining $336.4 Million of credit line liquidity through the U.S. government.

At the end of the long, sad story, Hamedeh says, Fisker has less than $20 million cash in hand, has stopped paying all creditors, and faces multiple lawsuits.

“Fisker Automotive may well go down as the most tragic venture capital-backed debacle in recent history,” Hamadeh said in a statement. “The sheer scale of investment capital and government loan money — over $1.3 billion in all — was squandered so rapidly and with so little to show for it that the wreckage is breathtaking. Bankruptcy will be the end of Fisker, but for the taxpayers, venture capital firms, individual investors, and Fisker’s suppliers, it will all be too little too late.”

Here’s the long sad tale in infographic form:

Private company research firm Privco has ranked the top 20 merger and acquisitions of the top 20 technology VC firms of 2012, including Ancestry.com’s $1.6 billion sale to private equity firm Permira and other top tech acquisitions such as Yammer, Meebo, Instagram, and NextG networks.

The biggest 2012 private exit on the list is Ancestry.com, for $1.6 billion, while Meraki, Yammer, NextG Networks, and Nicira all passed the billion-dollar mark.

Just a little more than a week, ago, PrivCo revealed the most acquisitive companies of 2012, which included Facebook, Google, Groupon, and the still-private Twitter, which was the first time a private company had made the top 10 list.

“We had our data team pull the largest exit for each of the Top 20 tech VC firms of 2012, including company sold, date of sale, and acquisition price,” Privco CEO Sam Hamedeh told VentureBeat in an email. “Most of the deal prices below have never before been disclosed publicly, including by us.”

Here’s the data, in visual form.

Note that some exits that appear smaller are ranked higher, as they returned more capital to the venture firm that primarily backed them.

photo credit: epSos.de via photopin cc

In 2012, 2,357 private technology companies were bought for a combined total of $84 billion, according to a new report from research firm PrivCo. That’s up 22 percent from 2011, but the real surprise is who is doing the acquiring.

Source: PrivCo

Most active buyers for 2012

The most acquisitive companies of 2012, Facebook and Google, each bought 16 companies. Surprisingly, the I’m-not-dead-yet Groupon bought 12, and even more surprisingly, Twitter tied with Cisco, a $112 billion perennial acquirer, with 10 purchases in the year.

Twitter, of course, is still a private company itself.

“Twitter actually buying as many companies last year as giant Cisco — and more than Apple, Oracle, SAP, Hewlett Packard, and other tech giants – that’s a first,” PrivCo chief executive officer Sam Hamadeh said in an email.

PrivCo plans to release its full 400-page report on mergers and acquisitions of private tech companies on Feb. 14. But the research firm gave VentureBeat a sneak peek today.

2012 was the biggest year for private tech company acquisitions since 2009, Hamadeh said. Companies like Facebook and Twitter rose to the top in part due to the phenomenon of “aqui-hiring,” buying a company simply — or mostly — to acquire its employees. In Facebook’s case, PrivCo’s report highlights that a lot of that happened before its May IPO, which of course, was a major carrot to dangle in front of the targeted companies.

The biggest category? Think enterprise.

Software beat out Internet services for the top spot, PrivCo says, with nearly 600 deals. Internet services ranked second with just over 400 deals, followed by communications, networking, and storage with about 300, and consulting with about 150.

The top two categories combined outweighed all the other categories combined:

Source: PrivCo

Top tech sectors for acquisitions – 2012

As per usual, Silicon Valley ranked highest in terms of number of deals, with 329. New York was second with 151, and Chicago ranked third at 81 acquisitions. That’s a surprise, to an extent, but remember that Groupon, which ranked third in terms of number of acquisitions in 2012, is based in Chicago.

In addition, PrivCo says, Chicago is home to Thoma Bravo, which “ranked as the No. 1 most active private-equity firm acquirer of private tech companies last year.”

Average deal volume was $36 million.

photo credit: racineur via photopin cc, PrivCo