Guardian angels
Thanks to the booms second driving force, finance, these companies have no shortage of eager backers. Although too small to interest many venture-capital firms, they are being fought over by wealthy individual investors, or angels in the venture industrys jargon. Many of these financiers made their fortunes during the 1990s bubble and are eager to put their know-how and cash behind todays tiny companies.
Some super angels, such as Aydin Senkut, a former Google employee who runs Felicis Ventures, and Mike Maples, a software entrepreneur who oversees a firm called Floodgate, are occasionally making bets comparable to those of conventional venture funds, which gather and invest money from a wide range of institutional investors. Individual investments of up to $1m are not uncommon. Sometimes angels are clubbing together to provide young firms with even larger sums.
Their cumulative impact is staggering. According to the Centre for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, angel investors in America pumped about $20 billion into young firms last year, up from $17.6 billion in 2009. That is not far off the $22 billion that Americas National Venture Capital Association says its members invested in 2010. Much of the angels money has gone to consumer-internet firms and makers of software apps.
The financing of more mature tech start-ups has also changed. Elite venture-capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers have raised billions of dollars in new funds in the past year or so. Some of this money has been pumped into late-stage investments , allowing companies to remain private and independent for longer than used to be the norm.
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