VCs Starting To Look At New Deals

from the just-a-little-bit dept

Yesterday, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a venture capitalist and I asked him what he was keeping busy with. He said that most of the past year has been focused on working with his portfolio companies, but in the last few weeks he's finally started looking at some potential new investments (though, he admitted, not too many of them looked promising). This fits in perfectly with this article suggesting exactly what my friend was saying: the doors are starting to open (just a bit) for startups looking to raise venture financing. Not everyone agrees, and there are still a lot of bad plans out there, but everyone is starting to hear of more early stage companies getting funded. I've also heard similar things from bankers and lawyers who say they've seen a slight uptick in funded companies. This is probably a good sign, as it means that people haven't completely given up - and these new companies (hopefully) will be a bit more based in reality. Update: Some numbers about recent VC funding shows that there's still plenty of money out there. The first half of this year alone beat out all of 1998 in terms of the total amount put into companies - however, most of that is to help companies survive, and not to fund new deals.