Tag: funding

startups

Are you an Irish startup seeking funding?

When I was in Berlin last week I met with Yoav Leitersdorf of YL Ventures. Yoav is looking to invest in interesting Irish startups. In his own words:

YL Ventures (www.YLVentures.com) is a venture capital fund that is focused on ‘exiting’ to strategic acquirers at good bite-size valuaitons of $20m-$50m rather than the typical $500m+ for most VCs. YL Ventures delivers excellent, concept-proven European & Israeli technology companies that it has invested in and helped grow & validate from the Internet, telecom (mostly mobile) and digital media sectors (and occasionally network security and enterprise software).

Recent press is available at http://www.ylventures.com/news.html, note especially the write-ups in Czech Business Weekly and blognation Italy.

If you are an Irish startup and are interested in getting in touch with Yoav, let me know in the comments or directly on tom@tomrafteryit.net and I’ll do an intro.

Technology

Where angels dare to tread!

At the recent IT@Cork Web 2 conference, reference was made by Fergus Burns to the difficulties startups have raising funds in Ireland. He asked the question “how many VCs are in the audience?” – there were none. As Fergus said, that tells its own story.

Things may be starting to change however. In his post on Irish Entrepreneurism Shel Israel noted that

The venture issue is another story and it is the one where I see change happening sooner and faster.

Now I come across an organisation which seems like a perfect fit for this need – Business Angels Partnership. The partnership works with startups to put together a business plan to present to its panel of business angels. The partnership is a not-for-profit so they don’t take any of the funding from the startup.

The funding provided is seed capital (100k-300k) early stage investment. No customer is required of the startup (although I assume it wouldn’t hurt the proposal!).

It sounds like an ideal proposition. For the angel investor, the partnership presents them with a qualified set of business proposals to look over and for the startup, they receive help putting the proposal together and get introduced to angel investors.

Win, win! Anyone know of anyone who has gone through this and did they win the lotto get funded?