Venture capital craters for early stage mobile apps

Updated

Here's some advice to entrepreneurs looking for early stage capital to build a mobile phone or mobile Web application. Hit up your grandma, cash out your IRA, or look under the car seat for quarters. Because you certainly aren't going to get any love from the venture capitalist community. In data released on Thursday at the Gigaom Mobilize 09 Conference, Thomson Reuters revealed that so-called "A" round investments in mobile startups has fallen off the map.

On an annualized basis, "A" round of financings for mobile companies fell 91 percent, from $405 million in the first nine months of 2009 to $37 million at the same point in 2008, a truly staggering decline. And it's not as if 2008 was a stellar year for venture capitalists, either, as the U.S. economy began imploding and limited partners began to default on capital calls in droves.

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