Angel and VC funding platform Angelsoft has launched an investor filtering tool, allowing entrepreneurs the ability to access detailed profiles on over 1,000 venture capital firms and angel investment groups in the U.S. Angelsoft allows startups to “push” their business ideas to over 400 angel investment groups and 15,949 investors across the world. The site formerly focused on connecting entrepreneurs to angel and early-stage investors only, but recently changed its model to include VC firms.
Angelsoft calls it an investor search engine, but it lacks a search box (a big flaw). Instead, entrepreneurs use Kayak-like filters to adjust their sorting results by how much an investment firm usually invests, what terms they typically offer, as well as by company-based criteria such as industry, location and stage. VC and angel firm profiles include a snapshot of the fund, industry expertise, prior investments, executive profiles and links to the LinkedIn profiles of investors. For the 450 investment groups that use Angelsoft’s VC and Angel dealflow management tools, the search engine results provide even more data, including a firm’s average response time to entrepreneurs applying for funding, number of applications a firm receives each month and additional past funding history.
The new investor sorting tool gives startups the power to vet and gain insight into potential investment firms and then choose to apply for funding from the firm which best fits their needs. It is certainly an interesting way to add more transparency into the funding world. Angelsoft was launched in 2004 by David S. Rose, Chairman of the New York Angels, and Ryan Janssen. The company’s platform is currently used by 450 angel groups and VCs (that use the platform for deal workflow), with 2,500 startup applications coming in a month. In December, the number of startup applications per month increased to just over 3,000, perhaps a sign that the economy is taking its toll on the ability of startups to get funding through more traditional means. According to Angelsoft, 2.6 percent of the applicants ultimately get funded, which seems relatively small, but that number has increased since December. As more traffic is driven to the site, the number of completed deals could rise.
http://www.mave...o_present.shtml
$1500 to present for 20 minutes?
Angel investors are charging bootstrap startups to present their ideas?
These are the kinds of opportunities you get on Angelsoft network?
pffffttt…..
If you present to 20 investors, you’re out 30k, there was your seed money. I wanna let people know, investment 99% of the time is done by friends or friend of a friend. These fees are for suckers. Nobody that really wants to invest in your business is going to ask for a fee for administrative costs. Lawyers ask for fees like that when they draw up the term sheets, not random investor clubs.
one to grow on * * *
Just to be clear, Angelsoft doesn’t charge anything to apply to specific groups. The groups set those fees. Of all the Angel Groups on our system over 95% of them are absolutely free (100% of the VCs) and the few that do charge usually only charge about $150 to cover administrative costs.
If a single group asks for much more than that, you should definitely ask some questions.
Ryan
COO, Angelsoft.net
So in other words, your saying that we should ask some questions about Maverick and any other investor group that charges outrageous administration fees for presentations ???
I’m going to be brutally honest. I’ve worked at a lot of small IT companies, including my old one, and I’ve met a number of VCs, most of them were small, but some were large.
These people are amongst the most pompous arrogant people I have ever met. I can’t see them doing anything more than browsing business plans, assigning the ones they like to their own teams and laughing their *sses off at online candidates.
–/ stops being brutally honest –
The first your should be you’re
Hey ChrisATSo33t, can you share more? It’s interesting to note that VCs like you mentioned can be a bunch of arrogant people.
Not that I’m disagreeing, but is it really true?
Yes, it’s true.
I’ll pick one I don’t care about making mad any more.
Mauro Mariani.
He was extremely arrogant. In my meeting with him he mentioned how he managed hundreds of millions of dollars, and how I should know who he is, and have heard some kind of legendary tales of him.
http://www.tech...e-theyre-aware/
His firm is so arrogant, they dead pooled one of their own companies in their Q3 newsletter before even talking to the people that ran it. Simply because they weren’t going to give it another round of investments because some user count milestone may have been missed, they assumed it was all over for that company and they were closing their doors.
I was a *little* late to the meeting because of a massive snow storm(-40 degree siberian weather, with all roads blocked for miles) and he was treating me like I was some kindergartner who had created a bad finger painting. He was like “oh, well haven’t you had to deal with a snow storm before, what did you do in those cases? I think you should have been on time.”
Every single road was closed and I was living in the sub arctic north.
Thank god I live in California now.
BTW, I found a great money saving tip, before you public beta, you can point your DNS to your roadrunner IP, and use WAMP on a cheapo local server, then when you’re ready to go live you just dump your server in the datacenter downtown.
I’m canceling my $60/mo SiteGenie dedicated hosting, and getting one of these tonight.
surpluscomputers.com/347913/rackable-systems-dual-xeon-2.66ghz.html
When So33t is ready to come out of beta, I am going to drive the same server I was running on roadrunner at home to MisDivision
misdivision.com/hosting/los-angeles-server-colocation-hosting.html
and colocate it there on 100MBPS with a remote reboot switch. I’m just going to swap the hard drives with a couple 1.5TBs from new egg and a gigabit card.
$60/mo saved!
My programming job just cut everybody down to 4 days a week, so you gotta do some serious sh1t to survive man!
FYI,
Roads were closed every where in the city I was in, and I was only 15 minutes late to the office, and called ahead of time.
Roadrunner doesn’t block port 80. I just tested it.
RR high speed is way good enough for private beta. I’m going to WinSCP my entire server to my media center then close my account when my rackable $99 dual xeon gets here!
I had been paying site genie in Rochester Minnesota $60 a month since last March,
http://picasawe...024333922242018
Now because I was cut back I have to host my project on my home road runner. Site Genie is probably going to have to cut people because I just dumped them. This is never ending domino effect of crap. I don’t think my $99 on my home road runner will be any worse than site genie, but still, I probably would have just kept it until I went live had this not happened.
I’m done now. I just felt the need to share with the market about to sink to 5000 in about 10 hours. I still have savings in there…
As a start-up company that is currently going through it’s first funding round after our Friends & Family round we decided to give Angelsoft a shot.
We have a product, partners, clients, monthly revenue about break-even and a great pipeline of prospects.
We are already talking seriously with several local Angels but figured for $250 we’d take the plunge and put it out to their community to see what response we would get. We also recorded a short video to help increase our exposure.
After 17 days (of our 30 day period) we had a total of 3 “views” from potential investors. We don’t know who they are, we just know that someone viewed our app.
We wrote a letter to Angelsoft to ask about this type of response and to their credit they responded quickly and gave a very thoughtful response.
Based on that we decided to update our application to better describe our company and offering. Over the remaining days we received an additional two views.
So 30 days we had 5 views of our application, or about $50 a view. While they can’t be held responsible for the views or interest an application gets, in our personal experience we could have just as easily submitted our proposal to 5 angel groups ourselves without any cost.
In the future I would use Angelsoft as a resource to find potential local Angel/VC groups, I would not pay the money to submit to their community at least until the market has changed and more Angels are looking outside of their local markets.
Just our experience, your results may of course differ.
crazy;typical greed that got this country in the fix it’s in now.
Yeah, The Keiretsu Forum is about the same, though depending on location, much much more expensive. A startup I was at paid $1500 for a 6′ table at one gathering (first and last paid appearance). Those who actually presented on stage were charged near $5k. On a crappy stage, with maybe 5 real investors, none of whom were able to invest anything other than small seed money.
I remember, one investor standing up and saying how proud he was of being able to tear apart startups – definitely not a constructive place for entrepreneurs to be; especially for the price.
The last question to ask is, “would my other investors think this is a wise way to spend their money?” If you don’t have any other investors, then you should be asking YOURSELF that, because you are the investor at the moment.
If you paid 1+ – 5k for a BBC dragon’s den experience where they mock you as well, I would consider taking action to get your money back.
I have met no less than 2 principle’s at major venture capital firms about investment. Neither was in a paid situation.
When a VC firm IS in fact interested, they will shape your plan to fit something that will be successful, and work on it with you.
The whole presentation thing like star search or American Idol is not for real. A VC ready to work with you is not going to sit there and cut you down, it would be counter productive to their getting anything out of the investment.
The Internet itself is a Social Network.
All Media is Social Media.
People try to over complicate things.
Address a REAL life problem with your company/business model/startup and funding WILL find you.
Branch out into ALL arms of Online Video/Social Media/Blogs and you will be found without paying a cent.
Do not let people push you around. The world is yours just as much as it is theirs.
Think 360.
Connect. Interact. Build.
might be worth $250 {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/XR0umOYKzk_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”might be worth $250 ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/TUFqrP3C2E”}}}
People that are starting up with no contacts are pretty desperate. Most of the people that have great success like Larry Page, or Chad Hurley had contacts through school or work. They didn’t have to do any of this type of work at all.
Focusing on this type of investment paradigm takes time away from your product also.
And of course there will always be wolves out there that want to prey on the sheep.
When I sold my email systems product a few years ago, I got a publicist. Within 1 week of hiring the publicist I got a low 6 digit IP sale.
A publicist may not be an obvious idea, but they use avenues you probably wouldn’t consider.
i like vator.tv. nice functionality and nice people. no charge. do find it funny when they have a competition and i compete with multi million dollar funded companies. companies with million plus backing are not startups. gets more funnier when you have Always On Media saying that wize is a game changer. wize appears to be a fico score style product engine based on multiple variables.
http://vator.tv...hangers-contest
visit vator and find some wisdom and entertainment for yourself. advice is have fun no matter where you promote and dont take vc’s or pitch sites too seriously. when your a true innovative entrepreneur many times you are all alone in your genre.
VentureLocator.com – value yourself
You’re better off using VentureCast (http://www.venturecast.net). For $29.95 per month you can send your business plan (and more) to an unlimited number of investors on their network. I used it a few months ago and was able to set up a meeting with a local investor as a result. Much cheaper than spending $2-5k.
I also don’t understand why you would want to send your business plan to somebody you never met. Really bad idea.
I use secureplan.com with BPP, but I only invite people I know personally. I think most people do it that way.
oh you’re so right, b/c most of the time no one else has ever thought of “your” idea. Investors and VCs meet with startups primarily to steal their ideas.
As a startup founder who’s bootstrapping plans got royally screwed by the economy and who has witnessed every previously sure-fire avenue for angel money vaporizing in the last 6 months as all my wealthiest contacts suffer one financial collapse or another, I’m at a point I’m about to take the Angelsoft plunge.
When you’re living in nuclear winter you’ve gotta learn to get used to eating canned food.
All the favors and intros and conferences I could have used a year ago have all vanished. So now I have to use the investor equivalent of craigslist to find cash.
I’m just happy something like angelsoft exists.
ANGELSOFT is the new name for M-D bathroom tissue.
the positive about anglesoft, it give you a light at the end of the tunnel. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/DVcQgVyRWP_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”the positive about anglesoft, it give you a light at the end of the tunnel. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/BAI4Riqwrl”}}}
They are all pirates!!! I got my first 100k from a stranger at a Starbucks. Cost me 2 bucks!
The problem with small capital like 100k is that 100k isn’t even enough to hire a really good developer. If anybody replies with …but India and China, you should leave now because you already lost.
So anyway, a good dev will want at least that plus benefits. So 100k is insufficient in most cases to start an IT business.
You need 1 million at the very least for the first year if you hope to succeed. Only the top 1% of software offerings make it. And only the top 1% of developers can create those software titles.
Angel investments are like throwing pebbles at a tank. A lot of pebble throwers are run over in Gaza and elsewhere in that part of the world. – 2 cents
Or you actually have your own skill set and work with a buddy from the ground up, on your nights and weekends from the day job. You know, like doing actual work grassroots style. Hasn’t cost us a cent to develop, besides time.
Yeah, that’s true. That’s how Youtube got started.
… Google’s first money was a $100K check, totally unexpected.
Amen Jason! I’ve built SlideSix.com from the ground up, by myself.
As an entrepreneur, I’m always excited when I discover tools that address startup funding. As we all know raising funding is very challenging/fraustrating. Startup capital markets are so inefficient and its nice to see people tackling this issue.
chris said first 100k not total raised
hi guys…
for my $0.02 worth…
forget the looking for cash route until you actually have something that’s generating something.. whether it’s eyeballs, or real cash…
without those, you’re simply an idea, chasing cash. but if you really want to start from the ground up. build a site where people with ideas/skills who want to work together on a sweat equity basis can come together and mingle/share thoughts, encourage each other..
build this.. and you’ll quickly expand to every college campus in the US…
add to this, the ability to do project magmt, source code backup… you’ll quickly have a pool of talented resumes of dedicated people, along with the underlying tools to help the businesses get up off the ground…
peace…
I like the way you think, and it is theoretically great, but in practice, there are a lot more expenses that can’t be covered if you’re underfunded with a serious business proposal (I’m not talking about Facebook Apps startups)… let alone your assumption that every startup is founded by students, who don’t have that money at all…
hi melvin..
you miss my point. my ppoint was that a number of businesses that can grow to be quite successful can be started by a few people who could meet via the site.
the point about the colleges, was that this kind of approach would grow, because of the viral/strong nature of the college population.
keep in minnd, google was started by a few college students.. intuit was started by a guy who got ticked regarding pc banking… etc…
the issue with most initial operations, is that people don’t have access, or know peope in their own circle to actually get started. this kind of site would provide the initia tools/processes to link together like minded people, as well as initial tools to build/track/manage software apps…
as an example… i’ve had to spend an inordinate amount of time putting together a dev/testing environment for a project i’m working on.. this kind of system would have saved me the time/effort/hassle of doing this. (i’ve got a network of 5-10 servers serving as my dev/project/testing systems…)
peace
Agreed, I realize that I’m too am guilty of asking for cash when I’ve yet to even build a working money making prototype…
Once you get the eyeballs and they see that there’s a business model, the money WILL come… it just takes time…
Ontopic: love Angelsoft already, it is the perfect tool for me, a fEuropean with no US connections at all, to distillate all the tech investors…
I do have concerns however about the functionality of this tool to ‘mass-upload’ my business proposal to all of these investors… it’s like cold calling in a odd way… and this image will have an impact on your credibility as a startup.
So, if you want to know which investors are in your territory, Angelsoft is a great tool, but I suggest to contact the investors yourselves instead of these massively untargeted behaviors. Everybody prefers a personal handwritten postcard over a printed door-to-door card, right?
This is a very poor idea. No reasonable entrepreneur would follow this route.
thefunded.com : been there done that. AngelSoft is just a leech — started out as a way of doing backend submissions/processing for online business plans and trying to hijack that.
stay with the funded.com : better model, less conflict of interest.
Agree, with the site like TheFunded, you can see feedback and rating and who to deal with $$$ in the future.
TheFunded is 100% free, BTW. People can post business plans and get investor introductions from other CEOs for free as well… Hard to beat the cost.
@sam – I aboslutley agree Sam, at least in the general sense. We built autowebengine.com on a shoestring budget. I paid for the server’s monthly cost, talked to a few excellent programmers I knew about the idea, and got a plan together. Rather than spending way too much time “chasing cash,” I developed the business model, deigned the front-end of the service, and they developed the back-end. We opened things up to other’s just like myself, without a huge budget, could use the system also for their own clients, and it began to grow from there. We now have multi-million dollar a year companies using our system, and just brought on our biggest client, a billion dollar a year company. We did all this through on our own time, out of my own pocket, as shallow as that pocket was. I think there are some brilliant ideas out there, but many don’t get off the ground because they can’t secure the funding. There are other alternatives to chasing after that investor. I’d be willing to bet there are just as many developers out there as there are investors who would be willing to give sweat equity to help build projects on a shoestring budgets because they believe in the idea and see the value.
blake…
when you start talking sweat equity, you get a lot of people who just want a job. or they believe their “knock-off” script is the way to go.
the unfortunate thing, if you get a few developers, and a guy who’s willing to work the phones, making calls, you can tell pretty quicky if what you have is workable.
but in this era, and due to the relative low level of sophistication of a ot of wannbe entrpreneurs.. they don’t want the sweat equity..
but what’s had me laughing are the stories i’ve heard from friends who’ve talked to guys, who’ve wanted 20-30% of a project, for doing 30-40 hours of effort, for a project that was going to easily have 2000-3000 hours of dev time.. not to mention the marketing/sales effort that would also be required!!
but yeah.. there are serious projects that if a gew guys could/would come together on.. the things would run. and even in the short term.. if the projects didn’t take off.. you’d have a portfolio of work that you’d be able to take into the job interview and get the job.
as a former mgr, i still want people on my team, who can demonstrate that they can help me make more cash than the next person!
peace
Wow! How did you find the excellent programmers??? That’s something I’ve been looking for, for Skye Club.
I will release in about 2 month a free tool doing more and for free
The free tool will be called http://www.capitalbooster.com
Were these guys trying to tempt fate when they came up with the name? Come on now… we all know Angelsoft is good for one thing and one thing only.
Anyone know how they did that google mashup map showing streaming activity?
Angels are a joke. Their brand will ruin them
tried to submit appiicaton and its broken. bummer what hour of day will it be operational do you close at nightime? my friend had problem also. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/kr3kgVtaBw_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”tried to submit appiicaton and its broken. bummer what hour of day will it be operational do you close at nightime? my friend had problem also. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/ulcv8Jc9jn”}}}
You just decreased your chances… What’s with the vulgar and the irritatingly long video comment?
just my nature. There is an Ass for every seat.
Victory for Angelsoft {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/poNQKj7NAK_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Victory for Angelsoft ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/9moMfvIW4J”}}}
Angel money is much much harder to get. Figure out a way to use a little less and last out the year on friends and family funds. Why is it so bad (besides all the obvious):
1. Many angels invest based on the hope that VC’s will come in on the next round. That is less likely these days.
2. Angels with cash (and nerve) see the world on sale. Buying houses, banks, GE, etc. Just buying CSCO is risky enough. Why mess with startups.
This company raised angel funding in 2007 and has stopped looking, as far as I know.
http://www.trip...s-to-Visit.aspx
Also, other travel websites have not received funding and have slowed down to almost nothing.
All that said, the angel groups still have to fund their meetings and breakfasts – so the bootstrapping entrepreneur foots the bill.
How am I able to create an account on angelsoft ?
Everyone looking to get the most valuable knowledge, and Entrepreneur Mentorship! need to go to http://www.entr...eurinspired.com
Read this post’s main text with this TidyRead utility.
Is it just me, or are more and more posters using comments to spam their sites/services more often than not lately….
Build a great product,
get as many customers as you can,
(social) network like crazy,
and
never ever give up (assuming you’ve been honest with yourself about the value of your product).
Thanks for the link. A funny thing happened when I checked out Angelsoft. I’m based in St. Louis, MO and the angel / VC capital is invariably on the west coast or north east USA. I hit the search button on angelsoft and the first investor listed was “billiken angels”–
http://angelsof...investor-search
They are based in St. Louis and look for startups with connections to Saint Louis University (where I went to law school … as well as my dad, mom, brother and sister also graduated). I assume the site does an IP search of visitors and changes the page results based on that info.
I like the new feature and thought it was cool and fast. What’s the most interesting is they claim to have every investment group in the US on their site.
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I think entrepreneurs, angels and VCs deserve a totally FREE and searchable matchmaking style web site where they can connect. Angelsoft is too restrictive, canned questions, etc.
What we need is a site where Investors and Entrepreneurs can easily search for each other specifying a myriad of criteria–Search by Region, Industry, Amount of Investment, Minority Owned Businesses, etc.
We’re talking a Datbase Driven Web Site.
Now who’s with me? Email me and I’ll send you the play-by-play.
I look for Investor who would like to invest in MALDIVES. I have projects ready with Business plans.
So it’s been 2 hours since I submitted my application and credit card info and unlike the website’s statement that I’ll be up in 10 minutes… well it’s been 2 hours.
They have no phone number, they only have email based support and according to the autoresponse it can take 24 hours to get an answer.
Save your $250!!!
I retract my statement. Customer service contacted me and, though it’s only been a few days, I’m VERY pleased with the service so far.
ok, I’ll try it, I’m getting 2.3 ROI. I need help with people go aggregating all this data and looking for the biggest chunks of profit” 415 750-1921″
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