It’s apparently been a busy few months for the newest graduates out of AngelPad, the startup accelerator program started two years ago by ex-Googler and tech investor Thomas Korte.
The ten startups in AngelPad’s Spring 2012 class have raised a total of $10 million in aggregate since Demo Day in May, Korte tells me. All the raises have been seed stage, and that number could grow larger soon, as three startups have not yet closed their rounds.
In general, it shows how strong investor appetites are for startups at the moment. “We definitely see the amount of money that people are raising per seed round has increase sharply,” Korte told me. “Everyone is quite optimistic.”
But it’s not a totally frenzied environment, he said. “Valuations seem to be really stable, each around $5 million to $8 million, with some outliers,” Korte said. All of the raises are convertible notes with caps, as opposed to priced rounds.
Some things have changed this time around, even from just a year or so ago. “What we’ve seen is that there are very few ‘party rounds,’ which is a situation where every investor puts in $100,000 or so,” Korte said. “It really doesn’t happen so much anymore. Most startups are looking for a lead investor.” That could be because of the need for the guidance that an investor with more skin in the game provides. “We’ve seen a lot of companies that raised party rounds in the past that maybe didn’t do so well with no adult supervision.”
AngelPad this past week started taking submissions for its next startup class, Fall 2012. It has received nearly 1000 submissions so far, but the class size will remain about the same, Korte said, at about a dozen startups.
TechCrunch TV was on the scene during Spring 2012 Demo Day back in May, and we got all ten startups to give us their elevator pitches. You can watch those right here: