5 Feb 2015

Some good news for overall startup community in the UK and especially for female entrepreneurs, but very bad for cleantech :-(

Some good news, and really bad news, according to 'the leading source of market intelligence on business funding in the UK'. (note; All the following graphs are picked up from the Beauhurst's report: Beauhurst Making Sense of UK Equity Investment 2014/15 Public Summary).

Good news comes first. Total number of deals and size of investment increased to more than one thousand deals and £2.3b invested. 
Total # deals and £ investment per year (Beauhurst, 2015)
Furthermore, the more you have female directors, the more you raise (forget about selection bias and correlation v.s. causation ;-p). This is good for us since our team has two female co-founders. 
Average deal size by number of female directors on the board (Beauhurst, 2015)

The next comes a bit complication: a trend toward crowdfunding that is replacing angel networks, especially in seed deals. As we seek a route of B2B business, this might become a hurdle for us to persuade less experienced investors who do not necessarily understand technologies. As we ask for not only money but also experience from seed investors, maybe we should focus on trying angel networks in Cambridge.
50% of seed deals and 20% of venture deals will be crowdfunded this year. (Beauhurst, 2015)
Angel networks now only account for 10% of seed deals. (Beauhurst, 2015)

The worst news is that the amount of  money invested into cleantech dropped by 60% in 2014, and the average size shrank down to less than £2M, which is smaller than the overall average size of £2.3M. This is really against as generally cleantech is more capital intensive.
Cleantech deals dropped significantly in 2014 (Beauhurst, 2015)
The hype might have gone; yet we have to give a go this year. Whatever we'd end up, we find excitement out of the journey. 

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