Our minimal criteria for investment:

✓ Your business is registered in the UK
✓ You are raising less than £5M
✓ Your investment opportunity is SEIS/EIS qualifying
✓ You have a strong advantage in an underserved or growing market

Please also read our answer on ‘What do you look for in companies’ for a better idea of whether you would be successful with us.

At South East Angels, we invest in people first. A great idea & traction does matter, but it's the founder/s behind it that’s most important to us; your drive, your judgement, and your ability to adapt.

We’re sector agnostic. We have a variety of backgrounds, skillsets, and interest areas across our investor membership. Our portfolio is a good representation of what we’ve said yes to before, however as our membership grows and diversifies so too will our interests.

Companies that typically get the most interest in our group:

1. IP-rich, novel hardware: often patented, deeply specialist, novel technology.

2. Platforms with proprietary datasets, or specialist audiences: companies operating in niche where founders have deep expertise or a space where data is not yet consumed by frontier models.

Anything that doesn’t fall into the above two categories would need to be de-risked with a good level of traction and founders with deep understanding of their market, commercial skillset, or strong brand. 

Due to the number of companies that send us requests, we cannot provide personalised feedback for those that are declined in the early stages of application.

A declined application is not necessarily due to it not being good (or even great). We’re selecting the top 1-4% of companies out of 100+ applications each month to pitch to our group and we invest in just one of those.

Yes, startups that are selected to pitch to our group but do not get funding always receive personalised feedback.

No, we do not limit ourselves to only investing in South East based startups, our objective is to invest in UK startups with the most potential. However, the majority of our investor community is based in the South East of England so we enjoy engaging with companies local to us.

Our investor members are high net worth individuals and sophisticated investors, many of whom have either previously built and sold a company themselves or have invested in a number of startups already.

To date, the group have invested anywhere from £50k to £500k into a business.

We are interested in companies anywhere from pre-seed/pre-revenue all the way to early Series A. If you’re raising more than £5M, it’s not one for us.

Minimum requirements for very early stage startups
The minimum we expect is that you have made progress in validating your idea. You may have: a clearly outlined pain point with a thought-through solution that can withstand criticism, initial market research that’s assessed both market landscape and customer journeys, a founding team, prototype/beta-product, brand materials, and an operational plan.

Having some initial proof in place before you start your investment conversations will help you have a more successful funding journey. You should also have a clear idea of what milestones this funding will help you achieve.

We are happy being the first investors involved, as long as we have the relevant expertise in the group.

We charge a 5% success fee on the amount you raise from our group upon receiving funds.

There are no admin or pitching fees to get in front of our investors.

We review the details and materials you have submitted and respond to all enquiries. If we are interested in taking your request further, we will arrange a 30-minute discovery call with you in which we will ask you some specific questions about your business and your raise. This is also a chance for you to get to know us, and ask any questions you may have about working with South East Angels.

Our angels prefer to invest directly. However, on larger deals (late Seed / Series A) we can invest via an SPV.

Each individual member ticket size is a minimum of £10,000 and an average of £25,000.

This isn’t a service that South East Angels provides however we recommend checking out raisefromangels.com which should cover most of your questions. It is important to do your research and understand the basics before approaching investors.