Joanna Glasner

With consumer loans increasingly difficult to obtain, Americans are putting more effort into attracting lenders by monitoring and improving their credit scores. That's led to more traffic for monitoring sites. And it's resulted in an increasing amount of interest in the credit score industry from investors. Over the past two years, venture and angel investors have funded at least a half-dozen startups offering tools to track credit scores, view offers from lenders, and protect against identity theft. Last week, the latest credit score-focused funding recipient, San Francisco-based CreditKarma.com, announced that it raised $2.5 million in a Series A investment round to build up its advertising-supported business.

Everyone knows the cost of starting up an Internet company has dropped precipitously over the past few years. But if current trends keep up, it could be so cheap that no one will need venture or angel funding to do it. That was a takeaway from a recent conversation with David Rose, the chairman of the New York Angels and head of early stage firm Rose Tech Ventures. Every few years, he says, the cost of starting an Internet company has dropped tenfold. Years ago, it cost about $2 million to get a strong concept to product launch. Shortly after the burst of the Internet bubble, the cost got down to a couple hundred thousand. Recent angel-funded companies have gotten there on $20k. And now, the cost is heading lower.

Earlier today, I interviewed Douglas Crawford, the co-founder and managing director of San Francisco-based Mission Bay Capital, which just announced an initial close of $7.5 million on a venture fund that will make seed investments in companies with founders or technologies associated with the University of California’s Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). Now, $7.5 million […]

Angel investors spent fewer dollars in the first half of the year, but stretched to fund a larger number of companies, according to a report released today by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire. The report estimates that angel investments in the first half of 2009 totaled $9.1 billion -- a decrease of 27 percent over the first half of 2008. However, a total of 24,500 entrepreneurial ventures received angel funding in the period, a 6 percent increase from the same period a year ago. Jeffrey Sohl, director of the Center for Venture Research, says the data “indicates that while angels have not significantly decreased their investment activity, they are committing less dollars resulting from lower valuations and a cautious approach to investing.”