Introduced by Jennifer Condon who said that it was developed in conjunction with the ISA and was aimed at giving a less formal intro to how EI work in this area.
About 20 EI clients here and lots of EI staff.
Cathie Hynes, Growth Capital
Started with slide borrowed from Brian Caufield showing stage of growth and relevant funding for each.
She spoke about the dilema around matching funding when private investors or business angels are not available. www.businessangels.ie relaunched to assist with that issue. Angels generally invest 50k to 500k and usually in the region they live in and sector they are knowlegable about.
Q's they ask - Team? Skills they have? Skills they need? Personal chemistry is very important. Then the usual core businesss questions.
KEY - what monies do you need know, what do you need over next 3 years, how do they get their return.
"There is money out there - for every muddy field bought by a developer someone sold it!" Cathy. She mentioned Diane Roberts who is the recently appointed national co-ordinator. Cathy then spoke about the network of private investors who EI have knowledge of - including serial investors. They also know some international investors.
They also work through intermedaries - banks, accountants and solicitors, stockbrokers. There are 108 investors on the database.
The route to these investors is an introduction by your DA (Development Advisor) to the Growth Capital section in EI. Cathy mentioned working with 8 clients who they arranged UK presentations to UK Angels with and are now doing the same in Ireland. They do prep work with each of those. The route has two streams - ones where EI have made investment decision and ones where the decision has not yet been taken. Former preferable obviously :-)
She then spoke about VC's - more structured and more onerous. Also businesses need to be aware of the life cycle of a VC fund - if you approach in the latter half of the typical 10 year period then you are unlikely to get funded.
VC funds to consider - AIB Seed Capital (fund managed by DBIC and Enterprise Equity) and BOI Seed Funds. Those 2 funds manage e46M in total. They both need to be seen to invest in Irish businesses.
Interesting - in response to a question I asked Cathy said that there is currently no delay with drawing down investmnet cash at present. Once paperwork is in place which is not always the case. That directly contradicts what I have been told by a number of businesses recently and maybe it indicates that the logjam caused by Dept of Finance has been cleared?
She spoke about an example of a investor teaser for a business called
Digitary and the key information it contained.
Mary Cryan asked about current angel investment and was told by Cathy that they are still active - angels take the view that they can control/influence an angel/seed investment more so than stock market or property! Investment dominated by tax based mechanisms (presume BES).
keith
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