Capital raising for companies raising £20m to £100m
Capital raising for companies and projects, assessed the way an institutional investor assesses them.
Our investment committee, led by Neil Woodford, assesses each company as a professional fund manager would, including the reasons an investor would pass, and we take only the mandates it believes in. We then prepare the company to that standard, bring the deal to the investors whose record says they back this kind of business, and run the process to close. Agents do the reading and the research. Our team makes every decision.
One mandate in four steps: the questions from Neil's judgements, our agents assessing the company against them, matching the raise to investors, and the introductions our team approves.
35 years of deciding which companies to back, and which to walk away from.
Trained on Neil's judgements, they read each company's documents and test it against the same questions he asks.
Our agents test the raise against every investor by what each has actually backed, and find the ones it fits.
Our team approves every approach. Where we don't know an investor, we go through someone who does.
35 years of deciding which companies to back, and which to walk away from.
Trained on Neil's judgements, they read each company's documents and test it against the same questions he asks.
Our agents test the raise against every investor by what each has actually backed, and find the ones it fits.
Our team approves every approach. Where we don't know an investor, we go through someone who does.
01 · The gap
Below £100m, a raise usually reaches the investors its advisers already know, mostly domestic and mostly the same group each time. Nobody records the investors who would have said yes and were never asked. The reason is capacity: a conventional deal team carries three or four mandates, because each one takes a person's time for months. That limits how many investors each raise reaches.
Our model →02 · Our model
Five stages, from the first document a company sends to the close. At each stage the checks are the ones a professional investor makes before committing money.
Our assessment process is the investment approach of our CIO, Neil Woodford, and we trained our agents on his judgements of real companies. From the first document a company sends, the agents build a deal record: the summary, the financial model, benchmarks for its sector and stage, and the gaps. The gaps become our information request to the company. Our investment committee then decides whether we represent it.
We produce the research note, the deck, the model and the data room from the deal record, to institutional standard. Everything in them comes from what the company provided.
We keep a map of investors that records what each one has actually backed and who it invests alongside. When we take a mandate, our agents rank investors against the deal and find a route to each one: a prior relationship, a co-investor, an introducer or a shared cap table.
The deal goes to investors in stages: a two-page research note, the full materials on request, meetings with us and with management, then the data room under NDA. A member of our team approves every message. We record every pass with its reason and use it to improve the map.
The investment committee, led by Neil, decides which companies we take and signs off the diligence. A member of our team approves the terms and every message that leaves. The agents read, benchmark, map and rank. They do not decide.
We record the reason for every decision we make, and the reason every investor gives for passing.
Growth companies in Health, Society, Infrastructure, Technology and Planet, and asset-backed projects in real estate, energy and infrastructure, raising £20m to £100m in equity or debt.
Fewer deals, in your sectors, in the same format every time, each one assessed by our investment committee before we send it to anyone. Or give us a mandate and we source to it.
Everything a first fund needs, already built: structure, materials, the allocator audience, and a regulated platform to launch on.
04 · The team
A small team, so that each mandate gets senior attention from the first document to the close.
CIO
Neil leads our investment committee, which decides which companies we take on. He has spent thirty-five years investing institutional money.
Our assessment process is his investment approach. He trained our agents by correcting their assessments of real companies until their work matched his.
CTO
Jon designs and builds our AI platform, including the agents that assess each company, prepare its materials and rank investors against the deal.
He builds agent-first: AI agents write and test our software under his direction, which is how a small team built the platform and runs it.
He has over 20 years in digital technology and financial services, including senior technology roles at UK investment firms, where he led large digital projects across the UK and EMEA.
SEO
James leads our capital raising and our relationships with investors. He has worked in international financial services for over a decade, and in the UAE since 2011.
He launched eight cross-border revenue lines for a wealth manager with over 110,000 clients and helped double the office network of a $15bn investment manager. In 2018 he was part of the team that launched dVAM, which raised over £1bn in its first 12 months.
05 · Insights
All insights →
The UK grew more than three times as fast as the euro area in the latest comparable period, just as the Prime Minister blames Brexit for its ills. Plus a Budget of 98 measures and no substance, Alphabet’s worst day, Anthropic’s prospectus and Microsoft’s buyout offer to 60,000 staff.
John Healey’s first Budget ducked the big decisions, taxed savers and landlords again and leaves the tax burden heading for a post-war record. The OBR forecast it rests on has inflation back at 2% while Bank Rate rises to 4.75%, which makes no sense to me.
Andy Haldane is right that this government won’t cut spending, and right that it should. Where I part company with him is on gilts: yields are high because of where the Fed and the Bank of England set rates, not because the market has lost faith in the UK.
Contact
Tell us what you are building and what the raise is for. Our investment committee assesses every company before we take it on, and we will tell you the outcome either way.
