Wall Street Journal mentions the 12 Angels!
WSJ - HEAVENLY HELP
The Situation: Angel investor groups are expanding their reach beyond hot tech start-ups. What’s In: Newer groups fund firms, regardless of sector, that serve a certain mission — including minority or women-led businesses and those that help a certain cause. Other groups that focused on high tech are now branching out to other sectors as well.
More Widely Available - What changed?
Angel investment groups — wealthy individuals who band together to invest in companies, often for an equity stake — used to concentrate almost exclusively on hot high-tech start-ups considered able to produce fat investment returns in about seven years or less. But a potentially dramatic shift in the funding landscape is emerging. As more angels with varying backgrounds link up, a growing number of these groups are aligning themselves with a mission and funding all sorts of businesses that support the cause.
Meeting Their Mission
Among the missions newer angel groups are focusing on are spurring economic development in a distressed region, funding women- or minority-led businesses, or helping a social or environmental cause. And mission-based groups are often willing to fund companies in any sector as long as they fit the group’s criteria.
Mission-based groups include 12 Angels Investment Group, started in 2005, which invests in firms that help prevent or treat addictions, such as alcoholism. The Los Angeles group’s first and only investment, so far, was Wonderland Center, drug and alcohol rehabilitation center.
“We already feel like we have a niche, and we don’t want to further narrow it down,” says Erica Duignan Minnihan, executive director of Golden Seeds, a New York-based angel group started in late 2005 that invests only in companies where a woman holds a central role. About one-third of Golden Seeds’ investments are consumer-product companies. The group is close to providing funding to a diaper company. Ms. Duignan Minnihan says while high-tech firms still tend to be the “most scalable,” meaning they can produce the high returns and fast exit angels generally seek, other types of companies can be just as lucrative if they have the right business plan and leaders. Artemis Woman LLC, a Wilton, Conn., firm that sells its beauty-care products through Wal-Mart and other chains, has received about $1 million in funding from Golden Seeds since 2004. Co-founder Ann Buivid says she and her partner were fortunate to find an angel group that understood women and the selling potential of their products. “When I show microdermabrasion products to men, they say ‘I don’t know what that is — will it wax my car?’