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The London investment market is buoyant just now. Accelerators, incubators, tax incentives and crowdfunding are pulling focus on early stage funding. Bigger investment companies are working earlier on up the pipeline; and many more investors are becoming angels. However, for the market to remain healthy, angel networks and larger investment firms need to work and continue to work closely together – and resist at all times a natural instinct that bigger fish should take all.

In 2014, I founded Wild Blue Cohort, an angel investor network in West London. We now have over forty members. They have closed thirteen deals in eleven early stage tech/tech-enabled companies, investments that have joined or triggered rounds that include the likes of Passion Capital, B, Forward Partners, Episode 1, GFC and TCIF. Through two new platforms, we’re about to extend our support for entrepreneurs and members: widening our offer by creating a new co-working office and accelerator space and deepening it by founding a new network for young entrepreneurs.

We believe passionately that grassroots angel investing with values attached will grow in the future – and so we screen prospects for a series of very broad indicators of performance, but also localism. Why? Because investors are interested in supporting inspirational, talented entrepreneurs who are delivering the ‘next big thing’ with high returns but also have an impact upon the world around them. The entrepreneurial economy in London is tough for early stage companies, on account of the high cost and other challenges to running a business in the centre of a global city, and investors, if they can, want to help them to overcome those challenges.

Our network makes sense in an age in which entrepreneurs need to grow markets and local networks, want outstanding, available, low-cost expertise and small amounts of capital to get new ideas off the ground. But also we believe that working in partnership with larger investment firms is essential to making that offer work.

Early seed funds, VCs, private equity, family offices and angel networks all play a different role in business finance, and their collaboration is essential. More investors in a deal create network effects that benefit business development. Diversified finance provides the entrepreneur with flexibility.  And a networked culture between investors helps to make for a climate conducive to start-up communities and a healthy mixed economy of private and social enterprise.  

The trend in millennial capitalism is towards networked relationships, shared purpose and that overused word ‘ecosystem’; and implicit is an understanding that what matters is not just profitability, sales and healthy markets, but also healthy market-places and market ‘spaces’.  Acute competition and a proprietary approach to investment can be at odds with the more social, networked and patient capitalism that many firms need.