Archangel Investors Limited

Sarah Hardy and Daniel McKiddie from our investment team are at Invest2Scale event in Edinburgh today for a day filled with insightful talks, networking and workshops, to showcase Scotland's best scale-up businesses. #Invest2Scale #Edinburgh #Scaleups #VentureCapital #GrowthStrategy #angelinvesting #businessangel #angelinvestor #investment

Archangel Investors Limited celebrated our annual Chorus event last week, which is an opportunity for our investors and investee companies to get together along with others from our ecosystem to reflect on the year gone by and to look forward to the future. This year was poignant as we remembered one of our co-founders, Barry Sealey CBE, who died earlier this year. We were fortunate to have our other co-founder, Mike Rutterford in attendance. As we reflected on the great institution which Barry and Mike created some 32 years ago, I noted how fortunate we have been to benefit from a strong membership base and a stable regulatory regime. The EIS regime celebrates its 30th anniversary this year and during that period, we have seen £32 billion of direct EIS investment and a further £30 billion of co-investment into 56,000 UK companies who have generated £192 billion in sales. Our own Archangels economic impact study, which we commissioned a few years ago, demonstrated that £1 of EIS investment could leverage up to £8.50 of economic value add and therefore, you can see how important the policy has been in terms of economic impact over the past thirty years. So in that light, it is very welcome news that the new Labour government has confirmed that the regime will be extended by a further ten years to 2035. However, EIS is a collection of five different tax reliefs which are equally important in terms of the incentives they provide to high net worth individuals to invest. Rachel Reeves has talked about putting economic growth at the heart of her agenda and we hope, therefore, that there will be no temptation to tinker with any of the component parts of a regime that has demonstrably proved its worth over a very long time. We have seen some changes and challenges emerging in the r&d tax credits regime recently with HMRC opening up protracted reviews, particularly in the SME space. This risks undermining confidence in the regime. We have also seen the benefits of Business Asset Disposal or Entrepreneur’s Relief being eroded in recent years and we hope that the Chancellor resists any further changes to that regime when she sets out her Autumn Budget in a few weeks, as that could have a real impact in disincentivising entrepreneurial activity. In summary, the importance of a stable fiscal regime in terms of maintaining confidence in the early stage investment space cannot be overstated. We are proud of the economic and societal impact which Archangels and our investee companies make in Scotland and beyond and we hope that the policy makers will sustain an environment which will allow us, and others like us, to continue to contribute well into the future.

Our Joint MD, Niki McKenzie, will be at Scale-up day at the FinTech Scotland Annual Festival in Edinburgh on 01-Oct.

A really exciting development from Archangel Investors Limited portfolio company, Speech Graphics, which has just released a self-service platform, Rapport, which allows businesses to easily create, animate and deploy their own Virtual Interactive Personalities. The platform integrates with a wide range of technologies and is a game changer in terms of how businesses will be able to interact with their customers. Scottish Enterprise Scottish Development International Scottish Business Network UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) UK Business Angels Association

“The latest appointments to the 1nhaler board demonstrate the ambition of the business and the market belief in the product from experts in the respiration and inhalation fields.” says our Director and Head of New Investments, Sarah Hardy on our portfolio co. 1nhaler. https://bit.ly/3VPkjlw

We are proud to support iGii in this exciting phase of their growth!

Congratulations to our portfolio co. iGii on their £8.8m round of investment from The Scottish National Investment Bank, Archangels and Par Equity. "As an ambitious Scottish tech company with significant global opportunities, iGii is a great example of the type of business we invest in to drive long-term growth." Niki McKenzie, Archangels Joint Managing Director. https://bit.ly/4c2XhPj #graphene #innovation #investment #tech #businessangels #angelinvesting

Love this vibrant rebrand of our portfolio company, Integrated Graphene, now iGii #graphene #innovation #businessangel #angelinvesting #investment

Our Investment Manager, Dan McKiddie, is at London Tech Week today & tomorrow - let him know if you're there and would like to meet up. #investingininnovation #businessangels #businessangel #angelinvestor

We are all incredibly saddened by Barry Sealey’s passing yesterday and our sincere condolences go out to his family. Having co-founded Archangels more than 30 years ago with Mike Rutterford, Barry was a true pioneer of angel investing. Mike and Barry got together with the intention of helping young Scottish companies grow – neither anticipated that more than thirty years later they’d have had an impact far exceeding that original intent.   Barry himself would have been very proud of what he built and the impact that Archangels companies have had in Scotland and around the world. More than 5000 jobs created and nearly £200m invested in some of Scotland’s most exciting and innovative young companies, many of which are using technology to deliver significant social impacts. From the sight-saving technology of Optos to the world-leading prosthetic technologies of Touch Bionics, Barry’s legacy investments are testament to the impact he set out to achieve back in 1992. He will be missed by all who knew him.