(My blogposts are like red buses in London: you wait for ages and then three arrive together).

This is the list of internet and mobile seed and series A investments for the first half of 2011 I wrote about in the previous post; however, with so many open source deal tracking sites available (Chubby Brains, Crunchbase, Venturebeat to mention three), a deal list is hardly worth writing home about.

What is worth writing about is who invested with whom in each deal: out of a total of 41 Seed and Series A deals, 12 were by made by angel syndicates, 6 by angels and VCs co-investing and 8 by VCs (with the remainder by asset management and corporate venturing investors).

It has been talked about before:  the so called “equity gap” – especially in the UK – which resulted in a dried up deal-flow for later stage VCs and caused the latter to venture out to earlier stage deals, co-investing (and seeding) alongside angels.

Has angels/VC co-investing at last come of age? If my graph is right, it seems so, at least in the US.  And since it has been remarked upon in the recent AngelBootCamp (video) in Boston, it must be official.

Notes for entrepreneurs :

• The participation (or not) of a VC does not seem to affect the size of the seed round which hovers at sub £1M.
• British deals are notable for their small number; let’s hope that this is because angel deals are less efficiently reported in the UK than in the US.

Notes for angels:

• Unless one is a household angel name, the VCs will remain reluctant to co-invest bar “special situations” (read: downrounds & re-starting).
• Well coordinated, tightly managed, small angel syndicates will be the entry point for angels with the necessary risk-tolerance and knowledge but with only modest amounts of capital.

So, is this a new era for startup fundraising? Are the days of entrepreneurs’ agony of how to cross the “equity chasm” from angel to institutional numbered? They will soon be. But the VC is a cyclical industry with short memory from one cycle to the next.

Will this give birth to a flourishing British entrepreneurial scene? No, that can’t happen, but – as with other initiatives which have emerged, like Tech City’s clustering and the meet ups in the Silicon Roundabout – it will help. What makes things happen is good ideas, capable people and risk-calibrated investors.

Half way into the year, it is worth taking stock of who invested in internet & mobile startups, with whom and how much.

H1 2011 mob & internet

The Internet bubble is not: despite Snapguide’s strap line on the company’s holding page on the web, it is neither showing nor telling much but is however closing a $2m round with Index, Atlas Michael Arrington (of Techrunch), Dave Morin (ex-Facebook, founder of Path) and Gary Clayton (from Nuance voice recognition). Anyone of you who remembers the dotcom era might feel uncomfortable with the size versus stage of the round: $2m with no evidence of customers. But this time is different. Really. People have been there and done the bubble and, in contrast to the markets, private equity investors have a long memory (too long sometimes).

Female founders on the up (at last): everloop  & shadow government are both female led and got angel funding. We will be eagerly tracking progress.

Same old, same old? The Paris-based mobile developer Storific got $150k  seed money from Kima Ventures to develop a mobile platform that lets customers place orders in restaurants, bars and hotels. I saw a couple like this lately, one from a team of MBAs. I did not think it was worth taking it further: Kima obviously knows something I do not. To the MBAs to whom I said no, (if they read this) mea culpa, it is likely that I was wrong.

Mixing business with pleasure: Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher brings glamour into investing with his participation in Zaarly (buy & sell anything with the people around you); and British writer, comedian and the ‘QI’ minded Stephen Fry seeds the Bath (UK)-based Ubitek Ltd .

The new kids on the block: LA based Sharesquare launched their beta QR code for groupies (aka performers’ followers and lovers) after raising ca. £100k from  hacker angels .