The Q4/2006 PricewaterhouseCoopers MoneyTree report just hit the wire. You can see the latest quarterly data for Georgia in the “GA VC Trends” dashboard at the top of the home page on this blog.

The good news, is that early stage and expansion stage deals were up from the previous quarter, both in terms of overall amount, and in average amount per deal. Later stage deals took a bit of a dip, going from $86M in Q3 to $46M in Q4, although the average amount per deal was about the same, given that there were half the number of deals done in Q3.

Early stage basically improved 100% over Q3 – not bad – but again, this is just one uptick. We’re only talking about 6 deals, over the 3 we had in Q3. So this is hardly illustrative of anything really.

The one thing I *really* wish we had was a way of measuring “real” early-stage deals – i.e. angels. Sadly, the data available for that phase is far from empirical (which is why I didn’t include that level of investing in the dashboard).

Cheers.

Some more breaking news from Atlanta. My friend Mitch Free over at MFG.com just sent the following notice to me, announcing a new round of funding, although he didn’t specify the amount (UPDATE: word on the street says $4M or so). Mitch will be joining us as our guest on the StartupLounge podcast later this month, so we’ll definitely add this to the list of things to discuss.

I have long felt that MFG.com (along with EZ Prints, Vendormate, and a few others) are leading the charge for early-stage Atlanta companies. These guys all continue to chop wood and gain traction. All of these plays have logical global expansion routes, although MFG is further along on that path than the others. Nice to see a globalization strategy paying dividends for them.

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