Atlanta’s Got The Fever For Early-Stage Deals

Atlanta’s investment community thinks early-stage deals in the region are just peachy.

As the TechCrunch Express rolls into town this evening, folks can expect to see an investment scene that’s been holding steady since 2010.

Deals in the “peach state” have remained pretty constant, according to data from CrunchBase, with the number of deals hovering in the 90-100 investments per year range since 2010.

What has changed is the stage in which investors are putting their money to work.

Investors in Atlanta — and Georgia more broadly — have moved from doing more late-stage investing to priming the investment pump with earlier stage, angel, seed, and Series A deals, according to the CrunchBase data.

The most active investors in the city and around the state remain the big local firms like Imlay Investments and Noro-Moseley Partners, but national players like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sequoia Capital, and New Enterprise Associates have all done at least three deals in the Coca-Cola capital.

Even Ashton Kutcher – tech’s dreamiest angel investor – has come in to get comfortable with some Southern technology firms. Kutcher is a backer of the Georgia-based Bitcoin startup BitPay.

Other rising stars in the venture firmament, such as Andreessen Horowitz, have Georgia on their minds through its investment in Pindrop Security, which raised $11 million in Series A funding to prevent phone-based con artists from defrauding unsuspecting rubes.

Among later-stage investments Kabbage has drawn venture and debt funding to loan working capital to online merchants that sell via e-commerce platforms like Etsy, eBay, and Amazon.

Photo via Flickr user Lima Pix

|Atlanta’s investment community thinks early-stage deals in the region are just peachy.

As the TechCrunch Express rolls into town this evening, folks can expect to see an investment scene that’s been holding steady since 2010.}

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