LOOT by Kirsten Grind on Portfolio.com
You might recall all the hand-wringing that took place last month over whether startups were facing a serious cash crunch, a debate sparked by a Wall Street Journal article and then continued over numerous other online venues.
TechCrunch naturally followed the debate as well, and decided to do a bit of its own research. Pulling data from its CrunchBase funding profiles, the tech blogging site found just the opposite—sort of. As it turns out, startups are handily raising angel and seed funding: The number of those deals jumped 33 percent from 2008 to 2010. But Series A funding dropped 9.6 percent during that time.
From TechCrunch:
“In fact, we’re on track to have almost two times as many seed deals this year as Series A, while the two were neck and neck in 2008. It’s also worth noting the number of companies raising angel and seed rounds has gone up, but the dollar amount invested has either lessened or stayed the same.”
The site put together a handy bar graph that you can find here. So, perhaps the cash crunch is really a Series A crunch?
