By Nick Ismail on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs
The Start-Up-Series competition is back after a month’s holiday!
The Start-Up Series is the UK’s largest seed funding and mentoring competition. Launched in 2016 by Worth Capital, the competition searches for the brightest entrepreneurs with the smartest ideas and invests real cash into promising start-up businesses. So far, the competition has invested more than £4.2m into over 20 young UK businesses.
The competition will run from the 1st to the 14th of each month.
Don’t miss your opportunity to secure up to £250,000 of equity funding and apply today.
The Start-Up Series competition
Each month one or two winners will be selected to receive package consisting of:
• Up to £250,000 of SEIS/EIS equity funding (subject to due-diligence, terms & conditions).
• A minimum of 2 years invaluable hands-on help from experienced mentors.
• Media coverage on smallbusiness.co.uk and other channels to promote your business.
We are on the hunt for B2B or B2C business across all sectors. As long as your business is eligible for SEIS or EIS HMRC advance assurance, then we’ll consider your application.
We’ll be impressed by innovative products or services, in high growth or underserved markets, with the potential to
Tag Archive for EIS
Hot Business News Today
The Start-Up Series competition – over £1 million invested in latest winners
by Nick Ismail • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Nick Ismail on Small Business
In September 2020, Small Business and Worth Capital partnered to re-launch The Start-Up Series – the UK’s largest seed funding competition.
Since then, five new winners have received a combined total of over £800,000 of equity investment from The Start-Up Series Fund and private investors. Three former winners have also gone on to receive over £300,000 of follow-on funding from the same source after achieving their impressive growth targets. All investments were subject to further due diligence carried out by Fund Manager, Amersham Investment Management.
Following the latest investment round completed in early April, Hayley Etherington, Business Operations Director of Worth Capital, said: “As the Start-Up Series approaches its 5th birthday later this year, we take great pride in having meticulously selected and crowned 25 competition winners from thousands of applications across the UK. They’ve received over £5.3 million in SEIS & EIS equity investment — that’s real cash, creating real innovation and jobs, and building loved brands.
“We welcome these latest five ambitious start-up businesses to the Worth Capital family with great optimism. As always, we’ll be working hard alongside the talented founding teams over the coming months and years, helping them to avoid risks
Hot Business News Today
The Start-Up Series competition – over £1 million invested in latest winners
by Nick Ismail • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Nick Ismail on Small Business
In September 2020, Small Business and Worth Capital partnered to re-launch The Start-Up Series – the UK’s largest seed funding competition.
Since then, five new winners have received a combined total of over £800,000 of equity investment from The Start-Up Series Fund and private investors. Three former winners have also gone on to receive over £300,000 of follow-on funding from the same source after achieving their impressive growth targets. All investments were subject to further due diligence carried out by Fund Manager, Amersham Investment Management.
Following the latest investment round completed in early April, Hayley Etherington, Business Operations Director of Worth Capital, said: “As the Start-Up Series approaches its 5th birthday later this year, we take great pride in having meticulously selected and crowned 25 competition winners from thousands of applications across the UK. They’ve received over £5.3 million in SEIS & EIS equity investment — that’s real cash, creating real innovation and jobs, and building loved brands.
“We welcome these latest five ambitious start-up businesses to the Worth Capital family with great optimism. As always, we’ll be working hard alongside the talented founding teams over the coming months and years, helping them to avoid risks
Hot Business News Today
How can you assess a Seed EIS investment manager?
by Lawrence Gosling • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Lawrence Gosling on Small Business
Checking the track records of a Seed EIS investment manager for professional advisers, investors or companies looking for funding can be very difficult because of the lack of independent data.
Although there are a number of research groups analysing the managers, they all tend to look at different elements of the groups and no-one tracks the actual investment returns.
So if a professional adviser or investor are doing their own research what should they be looking for?
Matthew Cushen, one of the founders of Worth Capital, acknowledges the challenge, particularly if the adviser is just looking for the number of companies the investment manager has successfully exited.
He says: “SEIS is much younger than EIS, which has been around for over 25 years and a number of groups can point to realised returns from exit, either with or without including tax breaks. Seed EIS is less than decade old, and by their nature many of the businesses we invest in are younger and are sometimes pre-revenue.
“At Worth we source investee companies through our Start-up Series where we offer successful companies up to £250,000 in the form of an equity injection, and these companies are at all stages
Hot Business News Today
How can you assess a Seed EIS investment manager?
by Lawrence Gosling • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Lawrence Gosling on Small Business
Checking the track records of a Seed EIS investment manager for professional advisers, investors or companies looking for funding can be very difficult because of the lack of independent data.
Although there are a number of research groups analysing the managers, they all tend to look at different elements of the groups and no-one tracks the actual investment returns.
So if a professional adviser or investor are doing their own research what should they be looking for?
Matthew Cushen, one of the founders of Worth Capital, acknowledges the challenge, particularly if the adviser is just looking for the number of companies the investment manager has successfully exited.
He says: “SEIS is much younger than EIS, which has been around for over 25 years and a number of groups can point to realised returns from exit, either with or without including tax breaks. Seed EIS is less than decade old, and by their nature many of the businesses we invest in are younger and are sometimes pre-revenue.
“At Worth we source investee companies through our Start-up Series where we offer successful companies up to £250,000 in the form of an equity injection, and these companies are at all stages
Hot Business News Today
Why is a diversified portfolio essential when seed investing?
by Lawrence Gosling • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Lawrence Gosling on Small Business
Many investors and professional advisers are tempted to put all their Seed EIS investments with a single investment manager who they believe has a good track record, but by doing so they are potentially increasing their risk — it’s important to have a diversified portfolio when seed investing .
Many investment managers are investing at Seed EIS and with the follow-on EIS investments in the broad technology sector, partly because technology is a large sector which has accelerated in popularity since on the onset of the pandemic.
Two Seed EIS investment managers, Nova and Worth Capital, argue that diversification is essential because just as investor would not put all of their investments into a single company listed on the public markets or a single main stream investment fund, so putting it with a single SEIS manager is not advisable.
Andy Davidson, one of the partners at Nova based in Liverpool, says academic research consistently shows diversification is achieved with a portfolio of around 30 companies, whereas most Seed EIS funds have between 5 and 10 portfolio investments. Simple maths suggests an investor should spread their Seed EIS investments between three to five fund managers.
Matthew Cushen, one of
Hot Business News Today
Why is a diversified portfolio essential when seed investing?
by Lawrence Gosling • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Lawrence Gosling on Small Business
Many investors and professional advisers are tempted to put all their Seed EIS investments with a single investment manager who they believe has a good track record, but by doing so they are potentially increasing their risk — it’s important to have a diversified portfolio when seed investing .
Many investment managers are investing at Seed EIS and with the follow-on EIS investments in the broad technology sector, partly because technology is a large sector which has accelerated in popularity since on the onset of the pandemic.
Two Seed EIS investment managers, Nova and Worth Capital, argue that diversification is essential because just as investor would not put all of their investments into a single company listed on the public markets or a single main stream investment fund, so putting it with a single SEIS manager is not advisable.
Andy Davidson, one of the partners at Nova based in Liverpool, says academic research consistently shows diversification is achieved with a portfolio of around 30 companies, whereas most Seed EIS funds have between 5 and 10 portfolio investments. Simple maths suggests an investor should spread their Seed EIS investments between three to five fund managers.
Matthew Cushen, one of
Hot Business News Today
How risky is investing in Seed EIS investments?
by Lawrence Gosling • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Lawrence Gosling on Small Business
Many investors think investing in early stage, growth companies is a high risk investment strategy, particularly when compared with the public markets where many of the businesses listed on the London Stock Exchange have decades of trading histories.
But as this pandemic has shown, just because a company is listed on a stock market or has been trading for a long-time, doesn’t make it low risk.
So should private growth companies, many of which has used Seed EIS investment and the follow-on EIS investment be viewed in a different way?
Well two specialist investment groups, Worth Capital and Nova, sometimes known as We Are Nova, believes investors need to think about how they view risk and effectively don’t immediately think Seed EIS equals high risk and large, listed companies equals low risk.
In a short video, the pair discuss how they aim to get diversification within the portfolio of companies they invest in across their Seed EIS funds, and how this can compliment the portfolio investors’ listed investments or other funds, such as investment trusts or unit trusts and open-ended investment companies (Oeics).
“#Startups are taking their place and are growing quickly; They are very nimble and able
Hot Business News Today
7 investor personas: how start-ups can understand their motivations
by Matthew Cushen • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Matthew Cushen on Small Business
No one should consider launching a product or service without getting into the heads of their consumer, digging into when, where and how often your offer might be purchased and what you are competing against for a share of their purse.
The same principle stands for understanding the motivations of a potential investor. After all you are selling something to them. Here are a few pen portraits of 7 investor personas that you might come across. Whilst you’re unlikely to meet exactly the investors below, you can expect to come across some combination of these characteristics.
1. Passionate Polly: she is intimately involved in your market, maybe professionally experienced or they have some empathy as a potential user of your product or service, for example a mother is more likely to understand baby products.
Tip: be careful in assuming that because someone knows your market that they will understand or appreciate your idea — they may be so entrenched in the standard thinking around the industry they find it hard to see a valuable innovation that could take a category in a different way.
2. Taxed Trevor: there are some highly attractive tax reliefs available for investors
Hot Business News Today
Why should entrepreneurs care about EIS and SEIS?
by Matthew Cushen • • 0 Comments
Originally written by Matthew Cushen on Small Business
Why should entrepreneurs care about EIS and SEIS? The simple answer is because your potential investors do.
No credible entrepreneur would consider launching a product or service without getting into the head of their consumer. They would make sure they understand the needs they were satisfying, when, where and how competing options where purchased and consumed, and what it takes to influence the consumer.
It’s no different when ‘selling’ your business to investors. The more you understand about them, their rationale and how they make decisions, the better you’ll do in attracting cash to your venture. This means researching what you can about a potential investor. Are they professional (i.e. invest for a living, as part of a structured firm, maybe investing other people’s cash) or amateur (an angel investor, either alongside their day job or having retired)? Where does the cash come from? What is their investment rationale? What else is in their portfolio? How much do they like to get involved?
There’s one aspect that drives many investors in the start-up space and one reason that equity investment for start-ups is more available in the UK than in many other countries. The government have