Investment in Minnesota startups may be good or bad, depending on whom you read.
The
Star Tribune's Wendy Lee reports that angel investors are scaling back and are unable to fill a vacuum left by a venture capital investors less willing to fund early-stage entrepreneurs.
Lee cites national numbers from the University of New Hampshire's Center for Venture Research for the angel-investor decline: an 11 percent drop in the first half of 2010 from the previous year and "the lowest percentage of angel investors funding start-ups at the idea or concept stage in at least 15 years."
She writes that venture capital investments in Minnesota also dropped to their lowest level in 15 years in 2010--a decline of $126.7 million from 2009.
The Business Journal's Katharine Grayson takes a more recent and less negative look at venture-capital investment in Minnesota startups.
Grayson reports that seven Minnesota firms raised a combined $51 million in funding from venture-capital firms in the first three months of 2011--$21 million more than the last quarter of 2010. She writes that "2010 was a brutal year for venture investment," noting that only four companies raised funds in the first quarter of last year.
Tech.mn's Jeff Pesek provides a similar and even rosier analysis of first-quarter investment in just the high-tech sector, listing 21 tech firms that received at least $38 million. Two of them--Cima NanoTech and 8thBridge --accounted for $25 million of that. Pesek provides a full list, and he notes ten tech deals worth a total of $3.3 million "facilitated under the umbrella of the Minnesota Angel Investor Tax Credit."