ACA Angel Funders Report 2022:
More Data + Industry Insights and Real Stories
The Angel Capital Association publishes the Angel Funders Report annually to increase awareness about angel investor activity and build a deeper understanding of the investing environment. The report provides context for seemingly disparate data points, identifies trends, and highlights innovative ways that ACA members are working together to fuel the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
The Angel Funders Report is based on direct investment data solicited from ACA member groups. The organization collects data directly from a broad spectrum of angel investors, including leading angel groups across North America, and the resulting report provides powerful first-hand information on the current state of early stage investing. ACA angel investing experts analyze and enhance the data with their knowledge of trends and best practices, developing a comprehensive insider’s view to share with the broader investment community. The angel organizations that provide the information for the report take many forms—groups of ACA members, angel networks, angel funds, networks with sidecar funds, and more.
Angel Funders Report 2022 Highlights Include:
- ACA member groups invested approximately $950 million in 2021 in more than 1,000 companies and even more deals.
- On average, angel groups invested a total of $5.3 million per group, an increase of 15% from 2020. The total amount invested in 2021 represents the highest total since we began tracking this data.
- Angels invested more dollars per company than years prior, although the absolute number of deals per group declined slightly.
- Portfolio companies raised a total of more than $5 billion (est.), leveraging their initial angel investments by 5X.
- Angels continued to focus on investing in seed-stage deals in 2021, reducing investments in later rounds. Angels invested more than 50% of their dollars in Series Seed, which accounted for nearly 60% of deals, up from 50% in the prior two years.
- The path to greater diversity in angel investing is proving uneven, with women CEOs making gains in the level of investment, but declining in overall number of CEOs landing deals in 2021. Asian or Asian American CEOs nearly doubled their amount of investment, and Latinx CEOs increased by more than 100% -- but Black
- CEOs tracked at about half of the amount invested in 2020.
- Health and life sciences have increasingly displaced long time angel mainstays like enterprise software, fintech, and hardware. In 2021, about 1/3 of all deals
were related to life sciences, and the remaining 2/3 of deals were spread among other areas. Medical technology and health technology continued to lead among verticals, although they have receded from their 2020 COVID-19 driven dominance.
- Angels have made positive returns on their investments. In 2021, for companies still operating at time of exit their median return was 2.7X.
Future of the Angel Funders Report
This year’s report is one step in the journey – learn more about how your angel investor group can contribute data to future reports!
ACA has big plans for the ACA Data Initiative, but we cannot accomplish our goals without your help. The Angel Funders Report is made up of data from ACA member organizations, and the report will be more and more valuable with each contributing member group’s data. Submitting your group’s data is a streamlined, organized process, and it’s the only way to build a data bank that can help all groups make smarter investment decisions.
