119 Investors Actively Doing Series A Deals Since March 1st

[ig1]

The Series A crunch isn't caused by a decrease of Series A rounds, from various studies (from cbinsights and others) Series A investment is actually relatively stable.

What's changed is that you're getting far more companies who have raised money at the seed level. So the percentage of companies getting on follow-on investment at Series A is dropping while the absolute number isn't.

Also doing it over a 30 day period probably isn't long enough to take into account the vagaries of randomness (rounds may happen erratically, there's typically a delay before round gets added to crunchbase, etc.) - probably makes more sense to do it from start of year.

[dmor]

Whether there is a series A crunch or not doesn't concern me (no negative tone intended, just want to clarify my intent), and I wasn't trying to validate that it exists with this data set. Raising a venture round is hard, and my hope it that this list helps entrepreneurs focus their efforts on active investors.

Here is the data you requested, starting January 1st (225 active series A investors): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdFB...

[rdl]

I think a16z is dominant because while there are specific other VCs who may be on different lists of "best networking investor" or "best security investor" or "best travel site for cats investor..." or whatever, but a16z is basically on every list, at or near the top, for every niche I care about. (EDIT: oops, this was a reply to the other comment on the page)

[richardjordan]

What amazes me - or at least what really leaps out at me - from this is how high Andreessen Horowitz is relative to the other giants, in the measure "Historical Total Investment in Rounds Participated In", given how recently they were founded.

I know for a lot of entrepreneurs they've become the number one "dream" VC to be funded by in the "if you could pick any VC to fund you who would it be" drinking game.

Great list. Love the work you've been doing on all this stuff recently. It's interesting reading.

[dirtyaura]

No doubt that A&H is very active, but it should be noted that they participated in Groupon's 950M Series D, which is 40% of their value in that measure.

[rdipasup]

Purely conjectural, but the Series A crunch that the media likes to sell us on, really really fear-mongering. If you look at the spread of $ to startups, it's on a constant rise. The problem here isn't the "crunch", but rather how information is perceived and understood. The Series A crunch MAY possibly be true on a linear perspective, but falsely on a logarithmic look.

[jaredsohn]

My understanding is that the Series A Crunch exists because the number of companies at the seed stage is growing at an even faster rate, so over time there are more and more seed stage companies competing for Series A funding.

[nsiemsen]

This is great! I've been working on a little project to pull in this data from CrunchBase in an interactive format.

http://peburn.com/

Data is only updated through March 28, 2013. According to what I have pulled from CrunchBase, both overall VC investment activity, and Series A are on 2011 and 2012 pace (through the first quarter of 2013). This site is a work in progress (I cannot design and I'm at my wit's end on layout), so I didn't want to share it quite yet, but this seems like a relevant time to do so. Feedback is welcomed. I have a ton of views of the data I want to implement and I ultimately want to start aggregating all the publicly-available VC Fundraising (not just company fundraising) and VC performance data here as well.

Anyways, hope it adds to the conversation.

[rafaelc]

Thanks for putting this together! The easier and more accurate way to decide if an investor is active or not is to see when their last fund was raised. This is publicly available in multiple places, such as CrunchBase.

The reason this makes sense is that a typical top VC fund deploys the vast majority of their capital in the first 3 or so years of that fund. So for example, as a VC at a firm that raised their last fund in that time frame, my mandate is to find and assist the best possible startups and in the process also fund them. So this means that a fund with that kind of characteristic isn't going to sit on the money - which means that any firm that raised a new fund in the last 2-3 years will most certainly be actively investing.

[rdl]

This is a lot more than I would have thought. I wonder who came up with the "Series A Crunch" theory. It really doesn't seem to have hit yet, if ever.

[jcr]

If I put on my tinfoil hat tight enough to cut off my circulation, then a rumor/myth of a "Series A Crunch" which makes funding seem dear is in the best interest of the VC's providing such funding. Though I don't know any of them, I'm sure must be at least some VC's with the integrity to say that from their perspective, they don't see a crunch. But it would be equally fair for them to say that they see a whole lot more startups happening recently, so competition between startups resulting in price/terms pressure does exist even if the subjective term "crunch" is a bit overstated.

Since I don't try to keep up with every new startup that is created, my perspective might be wrong, and my assertion of there being more startups now days could also be wrong. None the less, it sure seems that way to me from my casual reading.

[rdipasup]

Awesome. Thank you for the info!

[mediagearbox]

Someday, someday I will land an investor haha