Despite all the media attention venture capital gets, it’s far from the most common source of startup funding. As Diane Mulcahy explained in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article: ”Angel investors — affluent individuals who invest smaller amounts of capital at an earlier stage than VCs do — fund more than 16 times as many companies as VCs do,” she wrote, “and their share is growing.”
Last year total U.S. angel investments ran to $24.1 billion, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. More than 73,000 ventures received angel funding, and there were 316,000 active investors. Yet for how substantial the market is, there’s relatively little data on the decision making process of those who invest in early stage startups.
