---
title: "VC consumer investment trends by sector and stage"
description: "Analyzing VC investment data: Consumer services \u0026 ecommerce capture 70% of venture funding, with average deal sizes reaching $36M in services sector."
categories: ["fundraising","trends"]
keywords: ["venture capital","consumer investment trends","Tomasz Tunguz","ecommerce funding","consumer services","Series A investments","early stage funding","investment data analysis"]
ai_summary: "Consumer services and ecommerce dominate VC investments, capturing 70% of funding with Series A being the most active stage."
date: 2012-11-28
lastmod: 2026-07-30
canonical_url: https://www.tomtunguz.com/consumer-investment-by-category/
author: "Tomasz Tunguz"
---

<p><a href="http://tomtunguz.com/the-data-behind-vc-investment-in-the-consumer-web">Yesterday, I showed the increasing share of venture capital investments consumer companies represent</a>. But examining the trends at a category level may mask patterns by consumer category and also by stage. </p>

<p>So, I’ve created two charts: the first is a bar chart of consumer investment by segment and the second is a heatmap of of sector and stage. I categorized the consumer investments by 10 leading firms over the past 18 months into six buckets of my choosing. </p>

<h2>Consumer services and ecommerce represent 70% dollars invested</h2>

![image](https://res.cloudinary.com/dzawgnnlr/image/upload/q_auto/f_auto/w_auto/image_194_562424963)
Consumer services and e-commerce companies are the biggest recipients of investment. Combined, these two segments represent 70% of dollars invested and 60% of deals by volume. </p>

<p>In addition to being the most common, consumer services average deal size is $36M, 50% larger than commerce and social media deals at $24M, implying this segment fetches the greatest valuations. </p>

<p>Consumer services investments have boomed because of the growth of smartphones enabling innovation in transportation and the rise of socially enabled services built on Facebook and Twitter’s distribution mechanisms. </p>

<p>Ecommerce has witnessed a surge in investments in the past few years with the rise of couponing, subscription commerce and vertically integrated commerce. Given the challenges of many of these companies, I suspect this trend to reverse. </p>

<h2>Series A is the most vibrant stage for consumer investments</h2>

![image](https://res.cloudinary.com/dzawgnnlr/image/upload/q_auto/f_auto/w_auto/image_194_940491879)

<p>Above is a heatmap indicating the number of consumer investments in the past 18 months broken down by Series and Sector. S indicates seed rounds.</p>

<p>54% of investments made by these firms in the past 18 months are Series As. Only 11% are Series Bs.  About 22% are seeds (though this figure is likely far too low since many seeds are unreported). </p>

<p>As for category observations, ecommerce and consumer services command the lion’s share of investments, as we saw in the chart above. Media and gaming seems to be a category with particularly high follow on fund raising risk. </p>

<h2>Early stage consumer investment is bustling</h2>

<p>Despite the relatively small sample set of about 270 transactions, the trends are clear. VCs continue to invest in early stage ecommerce and consumer services companies.</p>

<h2>Sector explanations - Example companies  </h2>

<p><strong>Consumer services:</strong> AirBnB, TaskRabbit and Uber<br><strong>Ecommerce:</strong> Fab, HotelTonight, Warby Parker<br><strong>Social media:</strong> Pinterest, Path, NextDoor<br><strong>Media [&amp; gaming]:</strong> Tiny Speck, Rovio, Machinima<br><strong>Education:</strong> 2Tor, CourseEra  </p>