Newable Ventures - Robert Cowper-Coles
Founded in 1982, Newable is independently recognised as the UK’s leading investment network, providing equity, advisory, and lending solutions to around 12,000 SMEs every year. Deeply embedded in the SME ecosystem, Newable’s long-term relationships with government, funding partners, and the business community ensure that the start-ups it backs receive the most appropriate investment and the most effective advice and support. In line with this, the fund aims to invest in seven to ten early-stage, knowledge-intensive companies across specialist areas including electronics, automation, medtech, and spacetech. Focused on investing in game-changing technologies, the fund provides a gateway to Series A for visionary businesses that are now looking to scale commercial operations. Newable Ventures follows a robust and extensive screening process of around 1,500 early stage companies a year, providing funding for only the best 2% of companies which have also been vetted by an independent Investment Committee.
Newable Ventures also hosts Frequent pitch events, and encourages their network of 500+angels to co-invest alongside the Fund.
Nexus Investment Ventures Ltd - Matthew O'Kane
The Nexus Investments’ Scale-Up Fund provides each investor a diversified portfolio of 8 – 10+ EIS investments in high risk, but high potential early-stage entrepreneur-led businesses. These businesses will be in one or more of the data, digital, education and health sectors, areas of greatest potential for UK companies to make an impact in the coming 10-20 years.
As well as the Fund, Nexus Investments serves a large and active business angel co-investor group. The Fund Manager, Nexus Investments, has been arranging, advising and co-investing in these areas since 2014, having developed a promising track record and a distinctive investment model.
Returns are expected to take the form of outright sales of portfolio companies.
Nova Growth Capital Ltd - Alistair Marsden
At Nova, we believe things can be done differently. Our approach affords the investor access to tech enabled, growth-focused businesses at the earliest stage of a company life cycle (SEIS), all whilst aiming to reduce the risk associated with investing in startups. We do this by aiming to reduce the 5 most common startup mistakes. Our truly proprietary deal flow is provided by our cofoundry business, helping founders solve real problems felt by sizeable markets. Our cofoundry then employs over 100 people to consult, build and grow our portfolio companies, applying our investors capital into an operating model rather than a more traditional fund model. The result; our portfolio value has grown in excess of 80% year on year for 10 years.
• Target returns of £2.18 in the £1 based on targeted 20% year on year portfolio growth
• Returns of £5.70 in the £1 if portfolio growth continues at 83%
• A minimum return of 58p in the £1 in the unlikely event that every company in the cohort fails
• A 0.2% chance of every company in the cohort failing
Our senior team are a balanced mix between seasoned investors, start-up practitioners and successful entrepreneurs. Investments are deploy quarterly into a target of 10 companies each quarter through a mixture of SEIS and follow on EIS investment, further reducing risk by giving a diversified spread of circa 30 high growth, tech enabled companies per year.
o2h Ventures Ltd - Sunil Shah
o2h Ventures was co-founded by Sunil and Prashant Shah in the year 2018. o2h group operates from their proprietary 2.7 acre The Mill SciTech Park where they are developing a unique model for incubating small life science companies.
The o2h team are leaders in the biotech community and have been actively involved as investors, holding various board/industry positions as well as being engaged in grassroots scientific activity for over 20 years.
o2h Ventures nurtures and invests in emerging life science and tech companies and has launched the first EIS fund in the UK solely focused on backing early stage biotech and related AI companies. The fund is structured to be S/EIS compliant providing generous income, Inheritance and capital gains tax breaks for UK taxpayers. For more details, please see – www.o2hventures.com
Octopus Investments - Jessica Franks
Octopus is synonymous with small company investing and is the UK’s largest specialist manager of tax efficient investments., managing more than £9bn on behalf of both retail and institutional investors. Our experience spans more than 20 years and, in that time, we have invested over £2 billion in early-stage companies.
Each portfolio in the Octopus Ventures EIS Service will have around 10-15 companies selected for their ambitious growth targets and potential to become a household name of the future. Investors will have access to the expertise of Octopus Ventures, the team that manages Octopus Titan VCT – the UK’s largest VCT. Our previous track record for identifying, growing and exiting some of Britain’s brightest companies includes investments in Graze, Secret Escapes, Zoopla and Tails.com, to name but a few. Our pipeline of opportunities spans very early stage (seed) through to Series A and Series B investments.
We have aligned our fees with the interests of our investors. Our annual management charge is only payable if a company is sold for more than the amount invested into it.