Venture Capital Is Stronger Than Ever

Shibuya, Japan, July 27, 2015 (Newswire.com) - Admiral’s increase represents a cash figure of $53 million. Andrew Salter, Director Investor Relations says “the increase is ahead of global statistics and proves that VCs are getting stronger”.

While there have been rumblings recently that the traditional VC model could be in danger of extinction, threatened by more contemporary investment sources such as crowdfunding and super angels, this has proved not to be the case.

While it’s true that the early-stage landscape is changing, VCs are hardly on the demise, nor are professional VCs losing ground to crowdfunding and angels. In fact, the amount of VC funding increased last year up 37 percent over 2008 investment, when the industry was at its peak.

Rather than looking at the funding landscape as a zero-sum game, with one model rising up at the expense of another, it’s best viewed more as a continuum, with investors across the spectrum matching up with companies at the right stage of development or maturity. The truth is that there is plenty of opportunity for a wide range of investors and entrepreneurs, and a healthy economy depends on diversity — in both the types of businesses and the capital they can access.

These numbers alone should be enough to convince skeptics that VC isn’t dead.

Instead of a massive sea change that will lead to the extinction of VCs, we should expect that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Rather than become obsolete, we’ll see traditional early-stage VC firms become further embedded at the mature end of the early-stage investment spectrum, creating more room upstream for angels, super angels, pre-seed, seed-stage and micro VCs that offers more opportunity to more investors and entrepreneurs than ever before.