The Halo fund is open now through 31 August 2009 … with a minumum investment of NZD 25,000, it offers qualified investors passive exposure to a broad range of angel investments. Think of it as the “New Zealand Angel Investment Index Fund”.
The Halo Fund No 1 provides a passive ‘fund’ approach to Angel investing.
It gives investors a unique opportunity to gain qualified access in a cost effective manner to a portfolio of over 30 New Zealand early-stage, high growth investments.
It does so by partnering with New Zealand’s most experienced Angel investors to invest in new technology, high growth companies in high-value sectors like software, bio-technology, niche manufacturing and medical diagnostics.
The Fund will be a passive investor which invests on a one-to-two basis in deals vetted and approved by the co-investing partners and the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund Limited’s (NZVIF) Seed Co-Investment Fund (SCIF).
You can download the pitch book, or view the Powerpoint slideshare show below.
Please also be sure to read our legal disclaimer, and note in particular that nothing you read on this site constitutes an offer of securities.
Business Week published an interesting article on “Super Angels” – small firms unfettered by the corporate machinery of the bigger VC firms, and focussing on larger-percentage stakes in smaller seed-stage investments, launching startups for “only” $1M.
From time to time I refer to New Zealand as “honey I shrunk the country”, and so even though the scales at play in the US are different from here by orders of magnitude, we still have the “super angel” phenomenon, although we’ve approached it from the other direction.
With the flight of VC cash from the NZ market, players like Movac and Sparkbox have moved up the food chain from where they started. And it makes good sense, as the single-digit-millions (NZD) funding rounds, otherwise known as the “valley of death”, have been harder and harder to achieve from VC’s in the last couple of years.
The other key difference between NZ’s super angels and the microcap type funds covered in Business Week is that the NZ firms are true angels – they’re playing with their own money, unlike traditional VC’s who are typically playing with institutional cash.
I like to think that our model is better than their model for purely parochial reasons, and that the choices made by people with 100% of their own skin in the game will be more sensible. But we still have the basic problem in New Zealand that we find it tremendously difficult to scale our companies into international enterprises. And the main issue with that comes back to scale – “honey I shrunk the country”. It isn’t cheap to go offshore, and that’s where we need the supersize resources available in larger economies to make it happen.
But we can have a blended model (seed capital from NZ and expansion capital from offshore), and that’s what most entrepreneurs strive for.
We caught up with her last week in Wellington to talk about how the Association is going after nine months in action, and her plans for the future.
Key points:
The Association’s education programmes are going well
The angel clubs are in good health
2008 was slow with more follow-on deals than new investment
2009 is looking better, with more deals coming through
Syndication is a growing trend. In2006 36% of deals syndicated; this grew to 58% in 2008. Syndication is more likely to occur if investors have relationships with members of other clubs, and the Association is encouraging that.
To improve the angel scene, we need to increase the number of angel investors by encouraging others to get involved in angel investing, and encourage angels to improve skills through education.
The Association will be running 3-4 events per month, the highlight of which will be the Summit in Queenstown in November.
Angel investing is a portfolio game – spread your risk across a number of companies, and don’t put all your eggs into one basket.
Albert Einstein once said, “the only source of knowledge is experience; information is not knowledge.” There is blend between the two though – it is possible to gain knowledge from others’ experiences. I’d always prefer to be an armchair failure than a real failure and save my real effort for success, but that’s not always possible.
At WebFund, one of our key criteria in evaluating entrepreneurs in new ventures is their experience in failure and what they’ve learned from it.