You don’t need a lot of money to be an active investor, but it helps.

That’s one takeaway I had when I looked at the data to see which venture firms were most often doing deals and shaking the hands of entrepreneurs during the first half of the year.

Take for example First Round Capital. The early stage investor, which has offices in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco, is investing from a $130 million fund that it raised in 2010. First Round ranked as the fifth most active VC firm from January through June, having announced 27 deals, according to Thomson Reuters (publisher of VCJ and this blog).

In comparison, the most active investor year-to-date has a fund nearly 20 times that size and it completed 57 deals during the first six months of the year.

Do you wanna know who that most active VC is? Check out the slideshow below of the top 11 firms (two firms are tied for the 10th spot with 22 deals each).

Meanwhile, subscribers of VCJ can follow the month-to-month tracking of active VCs and top 10 deals in the cleantech, health care and IT sectors. The July 2011 issue came out last Friday.

No. 10: Domain Associates

# of Deals: 22 (tied)

Select Deals:

Astute Medical
BioNanomatrix
CoDa Therapeutics
Durata Therapeutics
Glaukos
Oraya Therapeutics
Otonomy
IntegenX
Tobira Therapeutics
VeraCyte

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