Mining the Series A Crunch

The Series A Crunch is a hot topic in Silicon Valley.  The overall premise is that the recent boom in early stage seed investments will result in a lot of dead or dying companies that don’t live to see a Series A investment.  Some of these companies may be valuable, whether its their team, IP, or something else.

Earlier this month a list of these companies was available for purchase for $5,000.  The fine folks over at TechCrunch / CrunchBase have put together their own list of nearly 1,300 companies available for free here.

Below is their approach / criteria for identifying these companies.  This is truly akin to panning for gold.

• Start with US companies that closed a seed (or angel) round on or after Jan 1, 2011
• Exclude companies that have received follow on funding
• Exclude companies that were acquired
• Exclude companies without news or employee updates in last 6 months
• Exclude companies known to have closed
• Look at remaining companies where it’s been ~13 months since their last funding

Source: CruncBase blog