Where the world's startup investors actually are
Investor money isn't spread evenly across the map, and the AngelMatch data shows just how lopsided it is. About half of the 125,000+ investors in the database are based in the United States. No other country comes close. The United Kingdom is second with 8,500+ investors, and then there's a cluster of countries in the 3,000 to 4,000 range: India, Germany, France and Canada.
Add up Europe and the picture shifts a little. Taken together, European countries hold roughly one in five of the investors in the database, which makes Europe the clear second region after the United States. Australia, Singapore, Sweden, Israel, Spain, the Netherlands and Switzerland each have 1,000+ investors of their own. The database covers 100+ countries in total, all the way down to places like Iceland, Malta and Uruguay with a few dozen investors each.
Cities matter more than countries once you're actually booking meetings. Three cities dominate: New York City has 10,000+ investors, San Francisco has 9,500+ and London has 5,000+. After that come Los Angeles, Boston, Paris and Chicago, each with 2,000+ investors, then a long tail of cities in the 1,000 range that includes Austin, Singapore, Mumbai, Toronto, Seattle and Berlin. If you're in one of those top seven cities, you can probably fill your first investor list without leaving town. If you're not, most of your meetings will cross a city or state line, and that changes how you write your first email.
Investors versus dollars: why the map changes your odds
Counting investors tells you who you could email. Counting dollars tells you how big the checks are. The two maps don't match, and the gap between them is where your strategy should come from.
In 2025, venture and growth investors put about $425 billion into more than 24,000 private companies worldwide, according to Crunchbase, and around $274 billion of that went to US-based companies. That's 64% of global startup funding, up from 56% in 2024. So the United States has about half of the investors in this database but took close to two thirds of the money last year. On average, American investors write bigger checks and back more of the huge late-stage rounds.
Europe is the mirror image. Crunchbase counts $58 billion of venture funding into Europe-based startups in 2025, up around 9% on the year before. That's a small slice of the global total for a region that holds roughly one in five of the investors here. The practical read: there's no shortage of investors to talk to in Europe, but the average check is smaller, so plan on more conversations to close the same round.
Inside Europe, the money follows the same few countries as the investor counts. The UK took around $17 billion in 2025, about 29% of the European total, with France and Germany at roughly $8.5 billion and $8.4 billion. Switzerland, the Netherlands, Spain and Finland round out the top seven. If you're raising in Europe and your home country isn't on that list, London is the closest thing to a continental hub, and a lot of the funds based there look at deals from across the region.
Angels stay close to home. VCs cluster.
The single most useful thing to know about location is that angels and VCs behave differently. Venture capital sits in a handful of hubs. Angel investors are everywhere.
The largest survey of individual US angel investors, run by the Angel Capital Association with Wharton and Harvard Business School in 2017, found that 63% of the 1,659 angels surveyed lived outside San Francisco, New York and Boston. Big shares were in the Great Lakes, the Southeast and the Mid-Atlantic. The same study put the median angel check at $25,000, and found that angels outside California, New England and New York actually wrote slightly bigger checks on average than angels inside those regions.
That lines up with what the AngelMatch data shows at the type level. Angels are the biggest group in the database at 82,000+, ahead of 51,000+ venture capital investors, and they're spread across far more cities and states than the VCs are. So the right first move depends on what you're raising. For a pre-seed or seed round built from checks of $25,000 to $500,000, start with angel investors in your own city or state. They know your market, they can meet you in person and they're more likely to back a founder that someone in their own network can vouch for. For a Series A or later, where checks run from $2 million to $100 million or more, you'll almost always be pitching investors in a hub city, even if you aren't based in one.
How to use the location filters well
Every country, state and city page on AngelMatch is a live list, so the way you combine them is what makes the difference. Here are a few habits that save time.
- Start at the level that matches your round. Use city pages for angels and early seed, since angels invest close to home. Use country pages for VC and later stages, since funds travel.
- Stack location with stage and market. Location alone gives you a list. Location plus seed plus your market gives you a shortlist. A 10,000-investor city page is a starting point, not a target list.
- Use state pages when the city is fuzzy. California alone holds 20,000+ investors split across San Francisco, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Los Angeles, San Diego and a dozen smaller cities. If you don't know which Bay Area suburb an investor works from, the state page catches all of them.
- Check time zones before you send. An investor in Singapore or Sydney reads your email 12 to 16 hours ahead of New York. Schedule sends for their morning, not yours, if you want to land near the top of the inbox.
- Put the location in your first line. Investors get pitches from everywhere, so a specific local hook beats a generic intro. Something like "we're based in Austin and you backed two Austin companies last year" works. An outreach tool that tracks opens and replies will show you which of those hooks actually get a response.
Regional notes before you pick a page
United States. Half the database. California alone holds more investors than any country outside the United States, and New York state has more than the United Kingdom. Massachusetts, Texas, Florida and Illinois each have 2,500+. The US is also where the biggest rounds are, at 64% of global funding in 2025. If you're raising from the US, get specific fast, because the pages are large.
United Kingdom and Europe. London is the hub with 5,000+ investors, and England as a whole has 7,000+. On the continent, Paris and Berlin each have 1,000+ investors, with Stockholm, Amsterdam and Munich not far behind. Germany and France are close in size at 3,000+ investors each, and they took almost identical amounts of venture funding in 2025.
Canada. 3,000+ investors, with Toronto at 1,000+ and Vancouver, Montreal and Calgary behind it. Canadian investors overlap heavily with US networks, so a Toronto founder should be looking at New York and Boston lists too.
Asia-Pacific. India has 4,000+ investors, centered on Mumbai and Bengaluru. Australia has 1,500+ with Sydney the largest city. Singapore has 1,500+ investors in a single city-state, and a lot of them look at deals across Southeast Asia rather than only at home.
Middle East. The United Arab Emirates has 850+ investors, most of them in Dubai, and Israel has 1,000+, which is a deep bench for a country of its size.
Where to start
Pick the one page that matches where your first ten checks will realistically come from, whether that's your home city, your state or the United States as a whole, and build your list there before you widen out. A focused city list plus one hub country is usually enough for a first round. Keep every conversation in one fundraising CRM so you can see at a glance which region is replying and which one has gone quiet.
United States investors
