[Updated 7/9/12 12:42 am. See below.] The average amount of capital that angels invested in early stage companies during the first three months of 2012 declined slightly from last year, according to a new report on U.S. angel activity.
The average size of deals involving only angels and angel groups was $940,000 during the first quarter, according to The Halo Report, a snapshot of angel investment trends issued yesterday by the Angel Resource Institute, CB Insights, and Silicon Valley Bank. That represents an 11 percent decline from the average deal size of $1.06 million in 2011.
But the median deal size, which represents the middle number in a numerically sorted data set, amounted to $700,000 during the first quarter—unchanged from the $700,000 median of 2011. The median deal size is often more meaningful than the average deal size because averages can be skewed by a few very large or very small deals, says CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal.
Angels are high net-worth individuals who typically invest their own funds in startup companies, and interest in angel activity has increased in recent years. As venture capital firms have pulled back, angel activity has been on an upswing, according to
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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