ARtGlass completing a new round of investments amounting to about $500,000. The company developed software that can be be installed in wearable devices and enable historic sites, museums and other cultural sites to offer visitors specially-designed, transparent smartglasses that they can wear during tours. The glasses superimpose three-dimensional images or text on a landscape or objects.

More than 50 nonprofits applied to participate in the Grow@1717 program at the 1717 Innovation Center in Shockoe Bottom.

Investments in startup businesses in the Southeastern U.S. dropped off during the spring because of the COVID-19 crisis but have show signs of recovery in the second half of the year, a new report has found.

The report by BIP Capital, an Atlanta-based venture capital firm, also found that investors have become more focused on deploying larger checks into a smaller number of deals, in part because the global pandemic has pushed investors toward more mature companies that are perceived to be lower-risk bets.

There was this massive shock to the overall system, and everybody locked in during March, April and May, said Mark Flickinger, chief operating officer of BIP Capital.

In June, you could see the amount of dollars being invested coming back, he said.

Everything stopped, early in the pandemic, he said. Then people realized we are going to have to continue to figure out how to move forward.

The total amount invested in startups in the nine states, including Virginia, that the report tracked amounted to about $3.3 billion for the first half of 2020, compared with about $9.2 billion for the whole year of 2019, which was the largest amount invested in one year since BIP Capital started doing its study in 2015.

In Virginia, investors deployed about $524 million in the first half of 2020, compared with a total of about $1.4 billion for all of 2019, which was the best year for Virginia since BIP started the annual study.

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Startup Spotlight: Investment deal flow to startups dropped during early stages of pandemic, but is now recovering, report finds - Richmond.com