As venture capital looks for ways to reinvent itself, enthusiasm has converged on putting seed money into small Internet businesses that can create returns with relatively modest exits. But this small-ball model appears unlikely to have much impact on the struggling venture industry as a whole.

“It’s a different asset class,” said Chris Mirabile, who founded Race Point Capital LLC, a group of private angel investors, last year, and has made a dozen seed investments since.

Many of those startups will be successes for Race Point, without attracting the interest of bigger VC dollars at later stages, Mirabile predicted.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Launch Capital LLC was among the first to do this kind of investing when it began in early 2008. “People said we were crazy,” said managing director Elon Boms.

In less than 3 years, Launch Capital has done 50 deals, and at least two more such firms, dubbed micro-VCs, have formed in Boston: Founder Collective and Nextview Ventures. In New York, which has emerged as a center of micro-VC activity, at least 16 similar entities have emerged, chasing a similar class of deals.

Recently, industry tracker CB Insights reported that while VC investing stagnated on the whole, seed investment in Internet companies tripled, hitting $23.1 million over 25 deals in the second quarter.

That’s a small share of VC, which is likely to deploy $20 billion to $25 billion this year. But micro-VCs and a professionalized class of private investor called "super angels" are operating an order of magnitude downscale, making investments often under $100,000.

They won’t likely show up in industry data, nor will they make a difference for limited partners (LPs) who are disgruntled with the asset class as a whole, said Bryan Pearce, who leads the venture analyst group at Ernst & Young LLP.

“Historically, (LPs) have wanted to put larger amounts of money to work in a single fund,” he said. “This model doesn’t lend itself to that.”

The activity has made an impact on the value of the capital-efficient Internet companies these investors favor.

“I can no longer expect to get into good deals at sub-million-dollar valuations,” Boms said. “The game has definitely changed.”

Lexington, Massachusetts, startup Daily Grommet Inc. has taken $3.4 million from angels and micro-VCs, including both Race Point and Launch Capital. It has 14 employees.

The Web company reaps a share of sales from one hard-to-find product it features each day. Founder Jules Pieri says without an additional dollar of outside capital, Daily Grommet‘s value could reach the tens of millions.

“I think people in general would be surprised to see how small e-commerce organizations tend to be,” she said.

“The revenues per employee are so much greater than any advertising model.”

All the excitement has led to concerns of a bubble in the seed stage. But traditional angels, whose deals totaled $17.6 billion last year, according to the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, say there’s plenty of room to grow.

“It’s worth noting,” said Rick Lucash, founder of Boston angel group LaunchPad Venture Group and an attorney at McCarter & English LLP, “that you search far and wide for anybody around here who’s complaining there are too many sources of funds.”