Angel Groups' Activity by the Numbers - Wall Street Journal (blog)

Just how active are “angel” groups—the associations often made up of wealthy individuals who want to fund very young start-ups—these days? They haven’t been shy, according to a new report that is set to be released Thursday at the Angel Capital Association Summit in Austin, Texas.

The report—the first one to be compiled by the Angel Resource Institute, Silicon Valley Bank and CB Insights–looked at 573 start-up deals nationwide in 2011 where $873.3 million was invested by angel groups, often along with individual angel investors and other institutional investors. The report found that angel groups bumped up the median size of their fundings over the past year to $700,000, up 40% from the median $500,000 round size in 2010.

Meanwhile, the largest share of angel group investor dollars—33.8%–went to Internet deals last year, with healthcare deals coming in second and taking up nearly a quarter of the money, according to the report.? The most active market for angel group investment activity was California, which grabbed nearly 30% of those angel dollars in 2011.

Data about angel investment activity has been spotty, partly because the ad hoc and highly individualized nature of such investing makes it hard to track. But there’s little doubt that overall early-stage investment activity has been on the rise in recent years, as the nation came out of the 2008 financial crisis and recession. In the first two quarters of 2011, total angel investments rose to $8.9 billion, up 4.7% from the same period in 2010, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, which tracks angel investing trends.

In Silicon Valley, angel investing has helped fuel the region’s latest tech boom , with a new class of angels—known as “super angels”— starting their own funds and essentially becoming venture capitalists in the process. The frenzy of angel investing has led to a crowded pack of start-ups. Some angel-funded companies—including Twitter Inc.—have become huge hits, though many of the start-ups aren’t expected to survive.

Active angel groups include Band of Angels in Silicon Valley and Tech Coast Angels in southern California, according to the new report, which relied on survey data of angel groups and other data from government filings and other sources that was compiled by CB Insights.

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