Angel funding back to 2014 pre-hype days

BENGALURU: The number of

angel funding

deals (of value up to $1.5 million) in 2017, has gone back to the pre-hype days of 2014.

According to the latest angel

funding

report by

LetsVenture

, a platform that connects

startups

with angels, there were 388 funding deals with an investment of $155 million till the third quarter of 2017, similar to the 2014 number of 316 deals with $154 million in investment.

This was a drastic drop from last year, when around $300 million was pumped into startups through 811 angel deals. The lack of investments in later stages has begun to hurt early stage funding as well.

Rajan Anandan, managing director of Google India and south east Asia, emerged as the most active investor in terms of the number of investments made into startups in both the last seven years and the past 12 months. He has made 70 individual investments, 10 of which were made in the last 12 months. “I tend to keep a steady pace of investing regardless of the sentiment at any given time. It takes 10-15 years to build a great company and worrying about cycles is not a good thing as an angel investor,” Anandan told TOI.

The other top

investors

included Girish Mathrubootham, founder of SaaS company Freshworks (7 investments), Kunal Shah, founder of Freecharge, and Aprameya Radhakrishna, founder of TaxiforSure, at five deals each.

The interest level among new investors has also dropped. The influx of 397 new investors, out of a total investor base of 549 angel investors this year was almost a 50% drop from last year and similar to the number of new investors in 2014 at around 378. Last year, there were 815 new investors. Shanti Mohan, founder of LetsVenture, said that the numbers are unlikely to go up dramatically by the end of 2017.

“The October to December period is usually the least active quarter in angel investing. But an important thing to note is that the average funding size has gone up by 20% compared to last year,” she said.