Angel Investment Network Blog - Page 9 of 16 - News About Startups, Entrepreneurs & Angel Investors

What’s in-store for Google’s finest at the Xoogler Demo Day?

Jenny Collins brings her passion & experience for bringing together smart, impactful R&D teams, across Google – to optimize the European start-up eco-system, and in particular connect Xoogler (“ex-Googler”) entrepreneurs with angel & capital investment.

So what can we expect from the Xoogler Demo Day?

This is the annual opportunity for ex-Googlers who have founded their own start-up to connect with investors.

This year, we have 170+ investors lined up and we are selecting 15 of the most credible start-ups from around three times that many applications. We’ll help each of them to create a succinct & delicious elevator pitch, of 2 slides in 2 mins & 2 Q&As, to attract further discussion in the social element of the day. read more

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Founder Market Fit & what it means for early stage planning

In his second guest post for Angel Investment Network, Dan Simmons, CEO of Propelia, explains ‘How understanding the shift from Product Market Fit to Founder Market Fit in the pre-seed space can now help influence your early stage thinking and planning’:

Understanding The Shift

There is a recognisable shift starting to happen in the early stage space. A shift that is important to be aware of and understand whether you are a founder or investor. A shift away from Product Market Fit and towards Founder Market Fit around and for pre-seed investment. This shift essentially means the way certain angel investors are starting to evaluate early stage founders is beginning to change. Change away from the traditional lenses that model and evaluate Product Market Fit towards a new phase where different tools, frameworks and assessment criteria are at play. read more

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Home a Future Tech Superstar

At Angel Investment Network we are continually forming partnerships so that we can help start up founders with fundraising and key issues they encounter.

One of the challenges that we see time and time again is the ability to recruit the right tech talent.

And that’s why we are excited to collaborate with Silicon Roundabout and the UK Government to train junior tech and startup enthusiasts between the age of 18-24 seeking to start a career in tech start ups.

As part of the programme, entry-level candidates, will be available to startups for 6 Month placements fully paid for by the UK Government. read more

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7 software due diligence considerations

By Roger Planes, CEO Silicon Rhino

Investing in tech startups can be daunting, especially if you don’t have a tech background. Investing in new ideas, market opportunities and teams can be exciting, and should remain the most important deciding factors when considering an investment. Here are a few points overall:

Documentation

Documentation is hardly at the top of the priority list of many early stage companies. While the tech team may know all the ins and outs of the project by memory, it will be much harder to onboard new developers or take over the tech if the need arises. Projects and quirks in the systems should be well documented. read more

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How to close your funding round before the end of 2020

We’re very excited to announce the first edition in our series of guest articles from our partners SeedLegals. SeedLegals automates the legals to help companies close funding rounds faster, and hire, manage and allocate equity to their team.

CCO Adam Blair explains legal considerations to help you close your fundraise before 2020 is out:

And just like that, it’s almost the end of 2020! We hope you’ve had a successful year up until this point, considering the year it’s been…

At SeedLegals, many founders we speak to are now thinking about how to scale their business in 2021, and beyond. And what’s the best way to scale? Securing funds so your business can grow. read more

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Digital Addressing startup OKHi raises £1.4M with support from AIN

OkHi, a Kenyan/UK startup addressing system for emerging markets, has raised more than £1.4M, supported by Angel Investment Network, the world’s largest online angel investment platform.

Headquartered in Nairobi and registered in London, OkHi is solving a problem that affects 4 billion people and costs businesses billions every year. The company was co-founded in 2014 by Timbo Drayson, who was at Google for 7 years, where he led the launch of Google Maps across emerging markets and built Chromecast. OkHi’s pioneering technology enables any business to collect an accurate address from their customer, verify it and navigate to it without getting lost. Its primary focus is to solve address verification for financial services, an endemic problem that holds back financial inclusion across emerging markets. read more

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Looking back to help you launch forward

Propelia is a UK accelerator that has worked with early stage founders since 2012, developing the concept of ‘Pilot Rounds’ in the pre-seed space. A Pilot Round that essentially identifies and connects founders with aligned investors, to enable them to quickly leverage SEIS capital to fuel, test and iterate strategic market assumptions over the next 6 months.

It’s a shift towards ‘Founder Market Fit’ which is seeing new tools, frameworks and approaches currently being developed, to enable greater deal flow alignment and fluidity in the early stage space – where ideally everyone wins. read more

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What is a Portfolio Career anyway?

Ben Legg’s career has spanned army officer, McKinsey strategy consultant, COO of Google Europe and global technology CEO. He has worked in over 60 countries, has five kids and is a self professed exercise nut.

AIN caught up with him to learn about the new emerging trend of ‘Portfolio Careers’.

What’s a portfolio career? And what is the Portfolio Collective?

A portfolio career involves monetising your skills in many ways and having multiple income sources, rather than a single job at one company. read more

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#BehindtheRaise with BorrowMyDoggy

We spoke to BorrowMyDoggy founder Rikke Rosenlund about disrupting the dog-sitting market, overcoming challenges during COVID and dos and don’ts in approaching angel investors. You’d be barking mad not to read on.

Tell us about BorrowMyDoggy?
BorrowMyDoggy is anonline platform connecting dog owners with borrowers. People sign up, create a profile, write a little bit about themselves or their dog and then they’re able to take a look at the suitable matches in their area. Matches are based on location and availability, and it’s all about getting to know each other really well before sharing the dog. People can check over here if they need the best dog training services. read more

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#BehindtheRaise with WeCoffee

We spoke to Ben Carew, Co-Founder at We Coffee, about how to complete a successful fundraise, and also equally important, what not to do.

WeCoffee aims to provide flexible and affordable workspace for post Covid working, along with curated events.

Benjamin Carew, Co-Founder of WeCoffee

Tell us about WeCoffee:

WeCoffee was created to make working from anywhere something anyone could enjoy.

By curating a distributed network of free and unique workspaces and a community you can cowork with online and in real life, we believe we are well on the way to achieving this. read more

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#SixtySecondStartUp with Pharma Sentinel

We caught up with Rav Roberts, CEO of Pharma Sentinel to hear his plans for their new ‘Medsii’ app, which makes it easy to discover if your medicines have unsafe side effects, give allergic reactions or have been recalled for safety reasons.

Rav Roberts, CEO, Pharma Sentinel

What does your company do?

Pharmasentinel.com is a pioneering B2C2B healthtech, leveraging AI to provide our users with trusted, timely and tailored medicines and medical conditions (mental health, diabetes, skin conditions) news, information, alerts and related content such as video podcasts, live streaming.

We also give 10% of our profits to patient-support charities such as Bipolar UK & the British Menopause Society, as chosen by our users. We launch with our consumer app called Medsii (medicines information for me) in 4 weeks time, yikes!

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Behind the Raise with flypop

Nino Judge, CEO of Flypop shares his advice for entrepreneurs about how he used Angel Investment Network to get his airline off the ground.

Tell us about flypop: The ‘pop’osition

flypop is a new British low-cost airline providing non-stop direct flights between the UK (London Stansted) and second cities of South Asia, starting with India, targeting the South Asian market in the UK, Europe and North America and their visiting friends & relatives (VFR).

flypop is also committed to protecting the planet by being the first and only fully carbon neutral airline in the world by carbon offsetting each passenger that travels with us. read more

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#SixtySecondStartup

Ruari Fairbairns is the CEO and Co-founder at One Year No Beer (OYNB), a platform focused on changing people’s relationship with alcohol.

What does your company do?

OYNB is a global alcohol prevention program, aimed at anyone drinking more than three glasses of wine a week. Our mission is to help people change their relationship with alcohol which leads on to most of them, fundamentally transforming their lives.

We are developing technology that will enable members to connect over the common goal of changing behaviour, such as caffeine, sugar, gambling, social media, ultimately empowering people to live life better. read more

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Green shoots of recovery post-Covid

Olivia Sibony contributed an article for the latest issue of CEO Today magazine on some research from the AIN platform that points to the continued interest investors have in sustainable startups. Contributing a double page spread Olivia discussed analysis carries out by AIN. Comparing the four month post-COVID period (Jan-April) with the four months before (Sep-Dec).

The research found ‘Renewables’ is now the 11th most popular keyword for searches, up from 14th pre-COVID, which was in itself a rise of 34 places year on year. Additionally ‘Greentech’ is now the 13th most popular keyword, up from 47th in 2018, a staggering increase. read more

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How to attract the best and brightest in 2020

The following is a guest post from Stevie Nicks, Digital Editor at justanothermagazine.com.

There’s no brand so strong — no company with a competitive advantage so lopsided — that it can miss out on the top talent and stay ahead of the chasing pack. In short, the employees of a business ultimately define it and chart its course. If you want to take your business to great successes in 2020 and beyond, the safest investment you can make is in new hires.

Finding someone with the right skills and attitude isn’t enough, though. Nor is having the money to afford their going rate, or even above that. If you want to convince leading professionals and eye-catching prospects to join your company in particular, you’ll need to pull out all the stops (there are plenty of startups out there, after all) — and in this post, we’re going to set out some key tips for getting the job done. Here’s how you can attract top talent: read more

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YouTube karaoke channel Sing King raises £550,000 via Angel Investment Network

The world’s leading online Karaoke channel, Sing King, recently raised £550,000 via Angel Investment Network (AIN). Sing King offers high quality karaoke content via its YouTube channel and has over 90 million views per month. The seed-funding raise took just seven weeks on the platform, with the original £400k target notably achieved within 4 days. The money raised is being used for launching standalone apps across IOS & Android as well as a web platform.

Founded in 2014 by Chris Michael, it is the only karaoke channel YouTube allows to operate due to licensing restrictions normally in place. The channel is run by a team of six full time staff from London. The business is approaching 7.5 million subscribers and has more than 2,300 songs, with dozens more added weekly. read more

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Startups & Covid-19

This week we spoke to Harun, the Co-founder & COO of Glorifyapp.com about the effects of Covid-19 on Glorify. Glorify is a Saas design tool created specifically for eCommerce entrepreneurs. It eliminates the need for professional designers, making it easy for anyone to design product imagery and marketing content for their e-commerce business in just a few clicks.

Our interview with Harun:

How has the coronavirus impacted your business?

Glorify is performing very well despite the coronavirus outbreak. Our greatest asset is that our company has a solid runway and therefore, all our key players have remained intact and have been working harder than ever to grow the business. read more

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Startups & Covid-19

This we spoke to Chantal, the Founder of the music licensing for performance sports platform ClickNClear, to find out how Covid-19 is effecting her business.

Our interview with Chantal:

How has coronavirus impacted your business?

It has certainly affected our market (we license music to performance sports) and slowed a few things down but it has not drastically impacted our business yet. We are still early stage and technically pre-revenue and were planning on launching in the summer. It may delay our launch slightly but we do not see it drastically affecting when we will be revenue generating. Sports events will happen again, it’s just a question of when so we just need to be as prepared as possible. read more

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#SixtySecondStartup

This week we spoke to Sara, Co-founder of On Good Authority – a premium outdoor lifestyle brand with sustainability at its heart. In the middle of fundraising before Covid-19 struck, Sara spoke to us about how they have had to change their business plans and why shopping sustainably is more important than ever.

Co-founders Sara & Hannah

Our interview with Sara:

What does your company do?

On Good Authority is a premium outdoor lifestyle brand that merges contemporary styling with waterproof technology using recycled fabrics and non-toxic water repellency techniques. We bridge the gap between fashion and function in a truly conscious way. read more

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Startups & Covid-19

This week we spoke to Rob Pringle the Co-Founder of Kinsume about how they are adapting to the effects of Covid-19.

Kinsume offers unlimited scalability to influencers’ work by enabling them to earn money from recommending their favourite products to their followers and friends. Operating in ecommerce and online shopping, they have had to change their approach to counter the fall in usage that they have experienced.

Our interview with Rob:

How has coronavirus impacted your business?

As we operate in ecommerce and online shopping, we’ve seen a significant fall in usage and sales through our platform. This is exacerbated by the nature of the products we mostly deal with: fashion, beauty products, makeup – mostly non-essential items purchased after recommendation from influencers and content creators. Mapping out your business plans in advance with the help of Andy Defrancesco is a great idea. read more

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