I wanted to understand who the most active seed investors are and which syndicates were the most prominent. For the purpose of this report, the search criteria were:

• Startups based in NYC
• First round of financing must have been between January 2010 and April 2012
• Round size between $250K and $1.5M

The research yielded interesting results. The most active investors over the time period were SV Angel and Lerer Ventures, each with a total of 17 investments.  The other most active firms were RRE Ventures and Founder Collective with 15 while First Round Capital had 14.

The most active investment syndicate was SV Angel & Lerer Ventures with 9 co-investments. This is not a surprise as it was mentioned in May 2011, that the two firms would work together closely. Next was SV Angel & Founder Collective with a total of 7 co-investments followed by Lerer Ventures & Thrive Capital with 5.

When you see firms syndicating frequently, it could suggest that the firms know each other well and/or have similar investment themes; As an entrepreneur raising a seed round, knowing this information can be very helpful.

The two diagrams below help to illustrate the findings. The first is a venn diagram attempting to show some of the major investment connections while the second diagram gives a more complete view of the connections between the different firms. In each diagram, the total number of investments made by that firm is in parentheses next to their names.

All of data used for the diagrams below were from sources available to the public. The vast majority of the data was sourced from CB Insights (a NYC startup).  Some of the rounds of financing are not disclosed or file State documents, so these diagrams don’t represent 100% of all financings using the criteria mentioned above.

Thank you to our Intern, Jacob Laufer, for compiling the data and putting together the diagrams.