One of the hardest things to do in the UK is to raise seed capital to get your new startup idea going. If you want to raise £1m+ it’s probably easier to find VC’s who are prepared to invest in you. Philip Wilkinson of Crowdstorm (nee Kelkoo UK) recently blog’d about this equity gap.
“It was noted that the UK has a distinct lack of visibility with so called Angel Networks (smaller amounts of investments from £20k – £400k from successful entrepreneurs) in order to help businesses scale up and get investment ready for these VC networks. Without this, a business is often caught in what is known as the “equity gap” where they don’t have enough money to grow and at the same time they can’t get the money because they are not big enough!”
Like Philip I wholeheartedly agree with the diffcultiy in raising these amounts from personal experience but in doing a quick search (I can’t say Google anymore – see why here) for this post, it was not hard to find a variety of Angel Networks:
- British Business Angels
- Xenos – Welsh angel Network
- GLE – London Business Angels
- Go Big Network
Angelpitch is a new start-up hoping to bring these two parties (angel networks and technology entrepreneurs) closer to each other by creating a video conferencing matching service.
“We found the hardest area to find appropriate investment was in the six figure segment which seemed to be really fragmented, so we decided to develop the Angelpitch service to address that area.”. – Paul Christian (CEO)
If you’re interested in becoming an Angel in this network, please email them a brief resume. Alternatively if you are an Entrepreneur who wants to get on the list early (before the submission site is built) you can email them a two page Executive Summary and they will review these and start the ball rolling.
Will Angelpitch work? I am not sure just yet as the $150 fee feels like a barrier to me but I would love to see a YouTube like video site where entrepreneurs pitch their business and Angels watch to find companies and entrepreneurs they like.