Friday, January 27, 2012

Bocoup, Atlas launch site to search angel deal data

By Galen Moore, Boston Business Journal

How much money are Internet startups getting in Cambridge? How much is a year-old software company typically worth, on paper? Can an entrepreneur really get a higher valuation just by moving to San Francisco?

Answers to questions like these are presented in Startup Data Trends, a web-based service launched Thursday by Cambridge VC firm Atlas Venture and Boston development shop Bocoup LLC. The service pulls trends out of data from the angel investment tracking site, AngelList.

The project is an offshoot of a Bocoup project called the Game Lab, which aims to develop new technologies for video games over the web, using HTML5 standards, said Atlas Principal Dustin Dolginow. He worked on Startup Data Trends with Bocoup’s Irene Ros. Dolginow said the goal is to level the playing field between VCs and first-time entrepreneurs, making industry knowledge open and standard.

“Why is it strategic that someone knows how much money to raise in a seed round? It’s idiotic. That should just be known,” Dolginow said. “No company is going to win because they knew that 750 (thousand) was the right number. But people use that knowledge on both sides of the table as leverage in the negotiation.”

In a blog post on the Bocoup website, company officials said that they tapped into the AngelList API, working closely with that organization and with venture capital firm Atlas Venture to allow users of StartupDataTrends to slice information about startups and their funding geographically and by specific market.

While the blog post is pretty heavy on the specifics of the coding of the new data filter site, it also states that more features will be added down the road, with different ways to silo the data coming from AngelList. The data are accessible because of the open nature of the exchange that happens on AngelList - startups post what they do and how much investment they need, and angel investors follow them, as on the social microblogging service Twitter, all in the open.

In the Bocoup blog, that openness was celebrated. “In a world of opaque venture capital funding activity, the AngelList team cracked open the process of raising money with Venture Hacks, and backed it up in 2011 with what is now becoming the canonical source for data on startup trends (EG: average valuation by geography and market),” the blog stated.

Bocoup, founded by Boaz Sender and Alistair MacDonald, is based in the new Innovation District in Boston’s Seaport area.