Dharmesh Shah (a longtime lurker on my blog - but he did comment once!) made a seed investment in Backupify, a provider of backup services back in June. Backupify has just received a larger angel investment of $900k from First Round Capital & General Catalyst (as well as some other really well known angel investors like Jason Calacanis).
Why am I mentioning this? Because it’s important to get the word out about Boston’s angel investment community. Dharmesh and the other initial angels invested $125k in the first round, and Dharmesh is a pillar of the Boston startup community.
I was out with a well known startup’s development group the other night, and one of their VCs from the West Coast was out with them. He and another investor (acting individually, not as part of a VC fund) invested over $500k in a young developer’s startup after just a couple of breakfast meetings. Obviously this was in Silicon Valley. There is just not a lot of this fast decision making angel investing in New England. The West Coast VC made it pretty clear that he thought that investors in Boston would never be able to make these sorts of fast, company forming investments.
He’s correct, in that we don’t have a lot of the “have breakfast, get a check to start a company” investors in NE. So I think it’s important to celebrate the investors who do make company forming investments. I don’t know how much research/effort went into Dharmesh making the initial investment in Backupfiy, but regardless, he helped get something going and we should all be proud that there are investors in Boston who do this sort of a thing.
Finally, TC mentions that Backupify is looking to move HQ… Let’s make them feel welcome in Boston and see if they will move up here!
