Investors in Startup Companies Go Online With Tools Connecting Promising Entrepreneurs To Worldwide Funding
NEW YORK and DUBLIN, June 16 /PRNewswire/ — Today at the Inaugural Business Angel Conference in Dublin, Ireland’s Halo Business Angel Network (HBAN) introduced a set of Internet-based collaborative tools that promise to greatly expand domestic and international angel investing. HBAN, a joint initiative of InterTradeIreland and Enterprise Ireland, is the umbrella organization for angel investing in Ireland. By adopting the Angelsoft platform as the standard, HBAN is dramatically enhancing the ability of Irish entrepreneurs to attract startup investments from angel investors here and throughout the world, while providing them with everything they need to effectively manage and streamline the funding process.
HBAN joins the business angel networks in over 50 countries, including the national angel federations in the United States, Canada and, most recently, Australia, in adopting Angelsoft as the country’s official Internet platform for connecting entrepreneurs with accredited angel investors and venture capitalists. In addition to deal flow management for angels, the Angelsoft tools encourage investors to mentor entrepreneurs, providing angels with unmatched solutions for managing ongoing relationships with startups. Every angel investor within HBAN’s nationwide network will now be provided free access to Angelsoft’s online tools as a benefit of membership.
By giving its member groups open access to Angelsoft, HBAN unifies the deal flow management systems being used, allowing investors from multiple groups across the country to pool their funds and resources in support of innovative Ireland-based startups.
Angelsoft’s comprehensive software-as-a-service will now power the internal collaboration process within each HBAN-affiliated angel network, professionally showcasing opportunities for prospective entrepreneurs, and supporting sponsors and individual members. As the new standard deal flow management tool for all early-stage investing in Ireland, Angelsoft enables entrepreneurs to apply for funding throughout the country, and the world, using one unified application.
Each angel group’s internal screening committee will be able to use the Angelsoft collaboration system to review and rate funding applications from aspiring entrepreneurs, while individual angel investors can use advanced Internet tools to lead deals all the way through to investment. Thanks to Angelsoft, HBAN angels can greatly shorten the time it takes to finalize an investment, while improving the due diligence research that enables them to make stronger investment decisions.
“Today’s announcement by HBAN was made in the best interests of its syndicates of Irish angel investors and entrepreneurs. HBAN is responsible for the promotion of best practice in angel investing in Ireland and until today Irish investors have not had a unified solution in place to effectively manage and streamline their angel financing activities,” said Diane Roberts, National Director for HBAN. ”Angelsoft has built an impeccable track record of success with more 20,000 investors from 500 angel networks in 50 countries. We believe a strategic partnership with Angelsoft will help strengthen our relationships with investors throughout the world, and facilitate international investment into Irish start ups”
“The adoption of Angelsoft by Halo Business Angel Network marks a significant step forward for Irish entrepreneurs and investors, whether in Ireland or elsewhere in the world,” said David S. Rose, Founder and CEO of New York-based Angelsoft. “Through Angelsoft’s powerful tools, angel investors anywhere can tap into a very vibrant start up scene in Ireland, making cross-border investing a welcomed reality.”
With this partnership developed by HBAN, entrepreneurs and members of HBAN affiliated angel groups and networks throughout Ireland will receive full and immediate access to Angelsoft as part of their existing membership dues.
About Halo Business Angel Network (HBAN)
Halo Business Angel Network (www.hban.org) is Ireland’s umbrella group for business angel networks. HBAN is dedicated to promoting angel investment and supporting the early stage entrepreneurial community in Ireland, working to create an eco-systems that promotes and supports early stage investment market. HBAN supports the formation of new and existing angel networks, both regionally and internationally, and within industry sectors. HBAN also acts as a voice to government, stakeholders, business and the media to promote the interests and needs of the angel and early stage investment community. HBAN, a joint initiative of InterTradeIreland and Enterprise Ireland, is the umbrella organisation for angel investing in Ireland.
About Angelsoft
Angelsoft (www.angelsoft.net) is the global provider of Internet-based solutions for early-stage investing worldwide. Angel investment groups and networks, venture capital firms, business incubators and entrepreneurs on six continents rely on Angelsoft to facilitate private equity investments into promising companies. Its award-winning collaboration tools make it easy for seed-stage investment groups to coordinate and process their deal-flow from initial contact, screening, due diligence and ultimately, through to funding and beyond.
For those new to early stage venture investment, syndication is when multiple investor groups (VCs or angels) contribute funds to a cumulatively larger investment sum in a single company. Syndication is an opportunity to spread risk, combine resources, and collaborate with strategic partners in other regions.
Venture Hype has published the first post of a 2-part interview with Paul G. Silva regarding “Angel Group Syndication Process Design.”
Silva emphasized the importance of unified collaboration. The groups used Angelsoft to coordinate their combined due diligence efforts:
Unite ALL interested investors from all groups into 1 due diligence team, all sharing 1 set of tools. In our case we all used AngelSoft’s Co-invest feature to make sure everyone was on the same mailing lists and looking at the same documentation.
Thomas Korte wrote a compelling blog post about a recent angel investment he made in under 3 hours.
Thomas notes, “It’s important to point out that such a turnaround is highly unusual, even for me. It is more common to take weeks, sometimes months before investing in a company.”
We were glad to hear how Angelsoft played a supporting role in his decision:
Another important fact was that all of the documents were well prepared and easily accessible. David gave me access to his “deal room” on Angelsoft (think salesforce for angel investors) and I could quickly understand what they do, what their plans are, and what traction they already gained.
Within Angelsoft I could also read the conversations other investors had with Ryan and see who else was investing. Using Angelsoft made the process of funding SetJam much easier and faster.
Mark Suster wrote a great article on raising angel money. Mark is a VC and 2-time entrepreneur, and his blog Both Sides of the Table is a great resource for investors and entrepreneurs alike.
We highly recommend reading Mark’s post on strategies for raising money from angel investors. Here is an excerpt.
One side of the argument – angels should price:
18 months ago I sat on a panel with Ron Conway, the legendary angel investor from Silicon Valley who invested in Google, Twitter, Digg and many other early-stage Silicon Valley success stories. The topic of angel pricing came up. Ron said he never likes to do convertible debt deals and always insists on pricing his investments. His rationale was clear, “If I invest in a company I open my Rolodex for them. I help them with business development introductions. I introduce employees. I give them credibility in the fund raising process. Let’s say the company was worth $1 million when I met them and I’ve helped them with both my Rolodex and my cash and they can now raise a round of venture capital at a valuation of $6 million. I would be hurting my own interests. A $500,000 investment at a 30% discount to a $6 million round is still priced and more than $4 million and is certainly worth much less than my investing at a $1 million pre-money where I could own 33% of the company.”
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, angel investor or VC, Mark provides valuable context and insight for you in his blog.
Bob Teree here, VP of Product Development at Angelsoft. We hope you are enjoying your winter or summer (depending on your location - Angelsoft has investors in 45 countries!).
Since our last update in September, the Angelsoft team has been hard at work adding many new features and enhancements to the platform. Below is a detailed list of those features, and the benefits they provide. Additionally, we have formed three exciting partnerships with the Angel Capital Association and the National Association of Seed and Venture Fundsin the US, and the National Angel Capital Organization in Canada. Angelsoft has become the official Collaboration and Deal Flow Management platform for these three organizations, which together represent the large majority of professional early stage investment groups in North America. We are currently working on similar relationships with the other leading business angel and venture capital associations around the globe. Among the important aspects of these partnerships is access to Angelsoft’s basic investor tools as a benefit of membership in these associations, and close working relationships with these associations to help us define future product enhancements to the Angelsoft platform.
Below, I have outlined a summary of recent enhancements and new features we’ve added since September based on your feedback. Following that, I’d like to give you a preview of what’s to come. First the new features:
Angelsoft 4.0 - A New Simplified Design: As you have probably noticed, the entire Angelsoft SaaS platform has a new look and feel. At the highest level, our goals for this release were to greatly simplify the Angelsoft interface and improve its usability. Here are some examples of the most important enhancements:
Gold features = Administratorfeatures: We have used goldas the color to represent all Admin and Deal Admin features. If you see an action or menu item in gold, then you have Administrator privileges either across your entire Group, and/or for that one particular Deal.
My Account: Every user now has a simple My Account feature to manage their Primary (Log In) Email address as well as their Password. In addition, Admins or Regular Users can add additional Secondary Email addresses that will allow you to email from those addresses into the Angelsoft system. If Angelsoft does not recognize the “from” email address, it will bounce the email for security reasons.
Greenfeatures = New activity, importantfeatures, and features about you: When you see green, you are seeing information or a feature that you control or that is very important for the page. For example, Your Interest Level and Your Rating show their values in green. In addition greensunbursts appear to tell you there is new information available within that feature (such as new Documents or Messages). As soon as you click on the tab, the greensunburst will disappear.
“Deal List” Enhancements: There have been many enhancements to the Deal List, including:
Custom Labels: Labels (also known as Tags) do all the work that folders do, and also give you an extra bonus: you can add more than one of them to a deal. Labels in Angelsoft function much like the same feature in applications such as Google’s Gmail. Once you’ve created a label and applied it to one or more deals, you can view all the deals tagged with that label by simply clicking the label’s name in the list on the left side of the Deal List. The most common ways that investors use Labels are to label deals for a particular event (such as “Fall Open House” or “May 2010 Luncheon”) or for a particular industry (such as “Green Tech” or “Consumer Software”). Their uses are endless, flexible, and limited only by your imagination (and if you come up with an interesting one, please let us know, so we can share it with other groups!) You can also pick custom colors for your labels to add an additional way to manage them. A word on the difference between Stages and Labels. Stages are mutually exclusive — a deal can only be in one stage at a time; whereas Labels are not mutually exclusive — you can assign many labels to one deal.
The GoldGear: You will now see a goldgear icon (a drop-down arrow next to a circular gear icon) just to the right of Deal Names in the Deal List for all the actions that can be applied to one deal at a time. These include things like editing access to the deal, updating its status, adding a deal lead, and inviting the entrepreneur to join the deal (if it was initially created by an investor).
Source Column: We have added a new column in the Deal List titled “Source.” This lets you quickly see where the deal came from. Possibilities include: Internal (deals created by your Angels or VC partners/associates), Web (deals submitted by entrepreneurs through your website), Referral (deals referred to you by another Angelsoft-enabled group), and Co-Invest (deals that have been shared with you by another Angelsoft-enabled group so that you can collaborate within a shared Deal Room.).
Green check-markin the Entrepreneur Column: This shows you that an entrepreneur is on the “other-end” of a Deal Room and that you can collaborate with him or her. (Deals without such a check-mark are ones that were entered by an investor (e.g. Angel or VC Associate), and while you can track and collaborate among yourselves about them, the absence of the green check-mark means that the entrepreneur is neither updating the information nor participating in any communications about the deal.)
Improved “Ratings & Reviews” Feature: Each group can now customize its own rating categories, and even change the rating scale to anything between 1 and 10. In addition, all scores (old and new) will be normalized to 100%. This customizable feature lets you tune Angelsoft to match your own work-flow processes. This is a very powerful feature for Business Plan Competitions and screening committees.
Improved “Basic Reporting”:
Deal and Member reports have been greatly expanded. More reports are available and you can also now export the vast majority of information you enter into the system for data backup and other purposes like manual manipulation in Excel.
Improved “New Deal” Feature: Entering new deals yourself (instead of having them entered by the entrepreneur) is now faster than ever, and more useful with the inclusion of One Line Pitch, Deal Lead and Referred By fields now exposed in the New Deal dialogue. This will improve the work flow for both VCs and angels or anyone logging deals into their own account.
“Group Profile” Enhancements: The public Group Profile page for your investment group has been restyled to highlight the most important group information and statistics. Administrators now have better control over what precise information is displayed on their Group Profile. While the decision to include, or not include, specific details in your group’s public profile is completely yours to make, you should know that our statistics show that there is a direct correlation between the extent of a group’s transparency about its statistics, and both the quantity and quality of the deal flow it receives. Feel free to drop us a note if you would like to discuss our findings!
Ability to Edit “Investment Date:” Admins (and Deal Admins) can now edit the Investment Date for a deal that has been move to the Invested Stage. We strongly encourage you to manually enter in ALL the deals in which your group has previously invested (even those from the Dark Ages before Angelsoft and then check to be sure that all the “Investment Dates” are correct. This will help you enormously in generating accurate reports. In addition, data displayed in your Group Profile will also be more accurate.
Upcoming New Features and Enhancements (in general order of release):
New “My Dashboard” for all users, including Guests: The “My Dashboard” page, which is the first page that all regular users (i.e. non-Admins) arrive at by default when they first log in, will be simplified and revamped. In addition, this page will serve as the homepage for any Guest whom you add to a specific deal as well as any person applying to become a member of your Group (the Member Application feature is primarily for Angel Groups).
Premium Reporting: Angelsoft will soon be launching premium upgrade (additional license fees apply) options for our investors. The first premium offering will be a very sophisticated reporting system that allows users to create detailed custom reports, and also provides access to a number of comprehensive pre-designed reports. This feature was designed with the help of many of our venture fund and ’super angel group’ customers. If you are interested in learning more about these options and potentially upgrading to access them when they are released, simply complete a Support/Feedback Ticket. Please note that all Admins within your group must upgrade in unison and at the same time and that the upgrade fee is purely driven by the number of Admin users in your group.
Deal Importing: As an increasing number of the world’s larger angel/investor groups are adopting Angelsoft, we have been working with them on a case-by-case basis to import all of their past deal activity from their legacy spreadsheets, databases and web sites. We are in the process of developing standardized importing tools, and over the next few months we are going to be able to bring that capability to ALL of our investment groups! If your group has any structured information on past deals in which you’ve invested (even large numbers of applications that you did NOT fund) we invite you to load those in to your Angelsoft account. This will give you a comprehensive picture of your group’s activity, past, present and future, and will allow you to use our extensive reporting features to analyze and report on your group’s activities. To take advantage of this importing service, simply complete a Support/Feedback Ticket and we’ll handle all the technical aspects for you, importing as many deals as you’d like!
Multi-Round deal management through Linked Deals: One of the most frequent requests we’ve received is for the ability to better manage multiple funding rounds for a single company. We’re pleased to let you know that a forthcoming release will support the ability to link deals together, so that multiple rounds can be associated with one venture. This will allow groups to support the integrity of each round namely, maintain independent access lists, and independent stages (so that, for example, Round A might be in the Invested Stage, while Round B might be in the In-Progress Stage.) The “Link Deal” feature will allow you to link deals in the order you want and will allow you to link both new and existing deals.
Event Enhancements: Many enhancements to our event management system will be released in the coming months, including improvements for RSVPs made through Angelsoft, to deal with the non-standard way that certain email clients (e.g. Gmail) handle invitation responses.
Contact Management Enhancements: We plan to greatly improve contact management (similar to CRM systems like Salesforce.com) to help you better manage ALL of your contacts, including Members/Users, Guests, Entrepreneurs and the Sub-Groups to which they belong. For example, you will be able to email all Entrepreneurs that you have invested in or that have applied to you.
We continue to welcome your feedback, and encourage you to reply to this email with any feedback, thoughts or requests you might have…or simply complete a Support/Feedback Ticket at any time to tell us what’s on your mind!
There they gave a great 30 minute presentation about how prospective angels should find deals, work with portfolio companies, and approach angel investing in general (I won’t spoil their grand finale, but suffice it to say that the last five minutes of their presentation should be mandatory viewing for every past, present and future angel investor on a monthly basis.)
But don’t take my word for it, listen for yourself:
Roger Ehrenberg, one of the smartest and most active angel investors in New York (and a member of Angelsoft-based New York Angels) recently led a $1.25 million angel financing of Domdex, an exciting new company in the Internet marketing space. In this interview from the DailyDeal with Mary Kathleen Flynn, Roger discusses the new breed of serious angels, and why they can be a viable alternative to traditional venture financing. Disclosure: I was one of the angels who participated in this round.
Today we launched an Investor Search Engine that includes all of the VC Funds and Angel Groups in the US. The tool includes a wide array of filters and sorts to help entrepreneurs narrow their funding search to the perfect group. We believe this a important step forward in bringing transparency and efficiency to the early-stage industry, and we’d love to hear your feedback.
Angelsoft.net Launches the Definitive VC & Angel Investor Search Engine
New York, NY (March 09, 2009) – Few would argue that it’s getting easier for startup companies to find investors. That however, is the bold claim made by financial technology provider Angelsoft.net, who today announced the release of theirInvestor Search Engine. The surprising news is that, given their unprecedented access to real data about real investors, they might just be right.
The Search Engine contains detailed profiles on over 1,000 venture capital firms and angel investment groups, with a dizzying array of sorts and filters reminiscent of Web 2.0 travel search engine Kayak.com. Entrepreneurs can filter investment firms based on how much they invest and what terms they typically offer, as well as on company-based criteria such as industry, location and stage. The real revolution, however, is the ability for entrepreneurs to sort the 450 investment organizations who use Angelsoft’s Investor Tools by actual metrics mined from the software, like each group’s average response time, number of applications received each month, and even real investment amounts.
“Entrepreneurs have never had access to this kind of tool before, but more importantly, they’ve never had access to this kind of data,” explained Angelsoft’s CEO, David S. Rose. ”Investors have traditionally been very guarded about how they manage their pipeline.”
When asked how they convinced their clients to open up, COO, Ryan Janssen cautioned, “Not all of them have, but our VCs and angel groups consistently rank ‘inappropriate applications’ as the biggest burden on their resources, and most of them know that will never change unless entrepreneurs have easier access to better information.”
It’s a poorly guarded secret that investors prefer to back experienced entrepreneurs, or at least those who have been referred by people they know. As such, it is increasingly difficult for new entrepreneurial talent to get discovered and funded. Most venture capital firms and an increasing number of professional angel groups no longer look at unsolicited business proposals.
“We’ve been battling this problem for the last 5 years,” says Janssen. “Because our platform powers the large majority of organized angel groups, as well as an increasing number of leading venture capital firms, the system can automatically ‘black-list’ entrepreneurs who apply indiscriminately, while promoting those companies that are the right match for a particular firm.”
Angelsoft also provides a suite of tools to help entrepreneurs manage their funding search, including an industry-standard online application, news feeds to monitor their progress as they move through a firm’s review process, and integration with the LinkedIn business networking site to quickly reveal their existing connections to each investment group. ”There simply is not a lot of trust between investors and entrepreneurs right now,” explained Rose. “We believe that communication and transparency is the key to rebuilding that trust, and the Angelsoft platform is taking major strides in this area.”
Angelsoft is a New York City-based software company dedicated to providing tools to investors and entrepreneurs in the early stage venture space. Our investor tools focus around deal flow management, company communications, group management, and deal sharing.
Your investment data is extremely secure. One advantage of using the Angelsoft platform is a dedicated team that works to keep your data private. Since this is our core expertise, our engineers have designed a system with several layers of security, both physical (network level with firewalls, intrusion protection, database security) and logical (application level security, secure data delivery over SSL). Each entity (VC funds, angel groups, et. al.) lives in its own sandbox, secured from other entities by strict authorization architecture that ensures only authorized users can access your data. The customer has complete control over who has access to their account, and can revoke permission at any time.
Angelsoft is a platform open only to qualified business angel networks and venture capital firms. We provide the software free of charge to angel groups and offer a subscription service to venture capital firms. Pricing varies for venture funds depending on size, starting around 5K per year.
Contact us at support [at] angelsoft.net. Why isn’t sign up automatic? We take the time to get to know every investor group that wants to use our software in order to preserve the high quality of our Angelsoft investor network. Someone from our business development team will get back to you in person to give you a demo, confirm that your group qualifies, and set you up with a trial account.
We provide a series of tools that make it easier for you to keep track of your deals in our “deal log.” You can input data through bulk import, e-mail forwarding, and entrepreneur self-service, or the old-fashioned way: manual data entry (which most VC partners tend to avoid!). Once your data is registered in the deal log, you can build an investment pipeline to move your deals through each step in the investment process while tracking notes on the status of each one. Then, using our simple reporting tools, you can get an overview of which deals you’re working on and what your next steps should be.
Our goal is to minimize the pains of administrative data entry while maximizing the power of reporting so you can spend your time working on deals, not dealing with software.
Recently, Scott Shane, a very smart and decent guy who is a professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve, has been highly visible around the web blogging and commentating in support of his recently published book, Fool’s Gold: The Truth Behind Angel Investing in America.
His main thesis is that ‘people’ have a very misleading view of that rare creature known as an “angel investor”, and that angels are far less numerous, generous, and active than ‘everyone’ thinks. In support of this he has extensively research the subject, pulling together all of the available statistics on the field, from the Angel Capital Association, the Center for Venture Research, and even us at Angelsoft (which we’ve been happy to provide.)
As I read his book, and many of his subsequent blog postings and commentaries, I am alternately baffled, bothered and bewildered by his conclusions. First, let me say that his research is legitimate and (as far as anyone, including me, can tell) accurate. So I am not disputing his facts. What I object to, however, is that he sets up straw men to demolish, in order to make lurid points that I believe lead his readers to draw inaccurate conclusions on the state of angel investing.
Take, for example, his contention that angels in America invested “only” as much money last year as venture capital firms. Is the fact of “angel investments = vc investments” accurate? Yes (to the best of our knowledge.) But phrasing it as “only as much” somehow implies that someone is maintaining it is much more. Hunh?
What we and the facts all agree on, is that LAST YEAR ANGELS INVESTED $26 BILLION IN US COMPANIES!! Who on earth is claiming it is anything higher than that??
Meanwhile, in a recent blog post on Small Business Trends, Scott opines that so-called “active investors” are a myth, because even among the cream-of-the-crop angels, the self-reported average time they spend with their portfolio companies is a miniscule 41.9 minutes a week [gasp!] Once again, I can confirm his facts, but substantively disagree with his conclusions!
I’m one of his “cream of the crop” active angel investors. I’m the Chairman of New York Angels (one of the largest and most active angel groups in the country, with 22 deals this year alone), have 70+ companies in my personal portfolio, and spend my full business time on angel-related activities. That said, it would be absolutely correct to say that there are some (indeed, many) ventures in which I have invested on which I spend less than 41.9 minutes per week. And the problem with that is??
I’m not running the business, the entrepreneur is! The last thing he or she wants is me looking over his or her shoulder and micro-managing the company. If that’s what I need to do, then I shouldn’t have invested in this venture in the first place.
Think about it this way: if, after pulling together an investment round of half a million dollars for a company (including corralling the investors, structuring the deal terms, and doing due diligence analysis, all for no compensation, and then investing $100,000 of my own money), I followed through by serving on the company’s Board of Directors (which would be active involvement indeed), kept updated by asking for and reading weekly management reports (which is way more than most CEOs want to provide), referred the CEO to a dozen high-level sales and business development prospects from my network during the year, and then introduced them to five top-tier venture capital firms for potential participation in a follow-on investment round…would that be the kind of “active” angel investor you’d like to have?
I think the answer from any entrepreneur I’ve ever met would be “yes, in a heartbeat!”
Now, let’s look at my time involvement post closing:
and then check to be sure that all the “Investment Dates” are correct. This will help you enormously in generating accurate reports. In addition, data displayed in your Group Profile will also be more accurate.