Our First Year on AngelList – FG Angels Update

A little over a year ago – and very shortly after AngelList announced their “syndicates” functionality – we decided rather than postulate about how AngelList Syndicates may or may not change, transform, or challenge the venture capital industry, we’d jump in with both feet. When we formed FG Angels we were the first institutional venture firm to launch a syndicate. We committed $2.5M to the effort with the intent of “making 50 investments between now and the end of 2014 in companies that list on AngelList…[investing] $50,000 of our own money in each company and the balance from our syndicate.”

Since that time we’ve invested in 42 different startups through AngelList (our first investment – OnTheGo – closed on 12/19/13, our most recent investment – Sportsy – closed last week). Our syndicate currently has 176 members and a total backing of $570k for each investment. We thought now would be a good time to reflect on how the program is going and share some of the underlying data from our experience.

AngelList themselves recently published an overview of activity on their platform in 2014. FG Angles was the most active syndicate on AngelList, accounting for $10.9M in investing activity or approximately 10% of all funding on the platform in 2014.

Below are some of the key statistics from our year on AngelList:

Total number of investments: 42
Average syndicate investment amount per deal: $316k
Largest syndicate investment in any single deal: $785k
Total number syndicate investors (syndicate members who invested in at least one FGA deal): 116
Total number of investors (all investors who have joined FG Angels in at least one deal): 410
# of investors who have participated in at least half of FGAngels deals: 30
Most active syndicate member investment total: $905k across 41 of our 42 FG Angels deals
% of investments with a female co-founder: > 20%

Overall, FG Angels has been a good experience for us. It’s given us the ability to work with some great entrepreneurs (you can see all of the companies FG Angels has backed so far here) and to make investments in a number of seed-stage companies that we would otherwise have passed on had the program not existed (by way of comparison, Foundry Group has made investments in nine new companies in this same time period).

Going forward, our plan is to complete the 50 investments that we initially allocated for and to continue to invest in promising seed stage businesses through the FG Angels platform beyond that. We don’t have a set number of companies that we intend to target with this expansion, rather we’ll keep investing so long as we feel that the program is adding value to the portfolio and driving returns for our investors and syndicate members.