Early stage startup investors are raising larger funds and deploying more than ever despite a shift in sentiment in the last few months.
Seed and Series A investments, generally defined as early stage, hit a 4 year high in 2019, with $1.15 billion raised across 387 deals, compared to the $1.13 billion across 416 deals in 2018, according to data from Venture Intelligence.
However, the fall in the number of deals has been consistent, from 540 in 2015 to 387 last year, indicating fewer companies raising rounds, but deal sizes getting significantly larger.
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“We are cautiously optimistic,” said Sanjay Nath, managing partner at early stage fund Blume Ventures, which is closing its third fund of $100 million currently.
“The target addressable market is large and there are many pockets with broken value chains. What is especially interesting is that younger founders care about hard problems to solve even more deeply, from using tech to tackle pollution to providing micro-loans to agri-tech, to improve basic water, sanitation and hygiene,” he added
Source: livemint
