One other bright spot in the overall decline, besides the IT industry, was medical software and information services, where companies brought in $102 million, up 75 percent from a year earlier. The number of deals in that business rose from 17 to 18.

Venture capital companies themselves are raising less money to invest and have been spending more time on exit strategies, Canning said. But in addition, more startups today are already bringing in revenue, so they can wait longer between funding rounds, she added. In the first quarter of this year, 55 percent of venture-funded companies had revenue. In the heady days of the 2000 dot-com bubble, only 28 percent had ever sold anything.

Canning said there is no tech bubble today, despite Facebook's recent $1 billion purchase of Instagram and the roughly $3 billion initial public offering by big-data software company Splunk on Thursday.

"A bubble is really when you see the entire industry raise in value, disproportionate to the value they're actually bringing in-house in revenue," and that's not happening now, Canning said. By way of comparison, she pointed out that total venture investment for all industries in 2000 was $94 billion.

The IDG News Service