Angel investors are increasingly looking to put their limited dollars into health care and medical devices, even if the total amount invested in early stage financing dropped dramatically through the first half of 2010.
A new report out of the Center for Venture Research, “The Angel Investor Market in Q1Q2 2010: Where Have All the Seed Investors Gone?” says that 24 percent of the $8.5 billion invested by angel groups went to the med-tech space during the first half.
That’s cold comfort, considering that overall investment in seed rounds for all industries declined dramatically during that period, even more so than during the height of the recession in early 2009. Only 26 percent of the angel dollars went to seed funding during the first six months of 2010, compared to 35 percent in the comparable period in 2009 and 45 percent of during the first half of 2008.
And there’s an increasing amount of angel-in-name-only investors — about 65 percent of angel group members are classified as “latent angels,” or investors who attend meetings but have not made investments.
The Center for Venture Research is a unit of the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics that studies early-stage equity financing.
