

119 Investors Actively Doing Series A Deals Since March 1st - dmor
http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/04/119-investors-actively-doing-series-a-deals-since-march-1st/

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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.

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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...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0ApqWF3CqjgjSdFBDWUk3N3lSZWZxLU15S1FwNlQ5cXc&output=html)

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ig1
My comment wasn't in anyway intended to be negative on the list, more just a
broader comment on the Series A crunch. I think your list is certainly a
valuable resource for people looking to raise venture money!

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dmor
Sorry, my choice of "doesn't concern me" language probably came across badly.

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ig1
No worries. You might find the vcdelta page interesting as well, it tracks
changes to VC portfolio pages so captures rounds that may not be in
Crunchbase:

<http://neuvc.com/labs/vcdelta/>

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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crapshoot101
this is correct.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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rdipasup
Awesome. Thank you for the info!

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mediagearbox
Someday, someday I will land an investor haha

