How to find angel investors for your startup

Last week I sat on a panel at the UKBAA Angel Group Symposium. The conversation was about how angel groups get set up, run, and grow, with the people doing all of that on stage. Towards the end I made a contrarian point that I half expected to land as a hot take. It didn't. The room mostly agreed, including the angel group leads themselves. So I'm writing it down properly, because most of the advice founders read about finding angel investors gets it the wrong way round.

Here's my take:

If you're a founder looking for angel investment, don't try to find individual angels. Find the angel groups and syndicates that manage them. That's where your time should be going, because that's exactly what those groups exist for.

The advice you'll find online tells you the opposite: build a list of angels, scrape LinkedIn for individuals, send cold DMs, work the events. None of that is useless. But it's not where the leverage is, and it's not what the angels themselves want.

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Reason one: angels don't have time to triage their own deal flow

Most active UK angels make somewhere between five and ten investments a year, and see hundreds of decks getting there. The bottleneck isn't writing cheques. It's reading. So the experienced ones outsource the reading. They join groups and syndicates whose leads do the screening, the first calls, and the early diligence on their behalf.

This is what makes the group lead, not the angel, the right person to approach.

On the panel I made the same point from the platform side. We deliberately don't accept individual angels onto ThatRound. The marketplace works with angel groups, syndicates, and funds, not with individuals investing solo, because individuals don't have the time to be filtering deal flow and logging into platforms. Triage is a job. So if you're a founder pinging single angels on LinkedIn, you're asking them to do work they've already chosen to outsource. The answer was sitting next to me on the panel: the group lead they outsourced it to.

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Reason two: angel groups are already pre-segmented for you

This is the part founders most often miss. The UK angel ecosystem isn't a flat list of investors. It's a structured network of regional groups, sector groups, and groups built around supporting founders from specific backgrounds. Whatever you're building and wherever you're based, there's already a group whose entire purpose is to invest in companies like yours.

For geography:

Regional angel networks exist because national lists don't fix regional capital deserts. Local groups do. "‍If you're a company in Cornwall, the closest place to tap into angel investment used to be in Exeter. That's why we set up Cornwall Angels: to give local high net worth networks a platform to come together and invest in companies with a Cornish connection." - Dennis Lucan, Cornwall Angels

Cornwall Angels has only been running for 18 months, and as their founder Dennis put it on the panel, he'd thought he had a good idea about who was investing locally before he started. In his own words, "after the first 18 months, I can say I did not know 95% of the people that came to the network." A national LinkedIn search wouldn't have surfaced any of them.

For sector:

The sector groups go deeper than you can on your own. Agata Zborowska who runs the angel syndicate at Conception X, described what that looks like on the panel:

‍"We work with founders over a longer period of time, nine months on one programme and ten weeks on another, and get to know the teams really well before connecting them to our angels. Because we're in the deep tech space, there's a lot of due diligence required on the technology and IP, and a long commercial pathway ahead of the teams."

That's a level of context a generic angel list won't give you.

For community:

Groups like Diversity X Ventures back founders from under-represented backgrounds, and attract angels who actively want to invest in them.

Anna Colombatti at Diversity X put the mission on the panel as tackling two things at once: "One is representation on the investor side. We want to democratise access to angel investing. And on the founder side, we want to invest in a broad variety of diverse founders, across gender, ethnicity, disability, neurodiversity, the LGBT community, socio-economic background, and over 50s." If you're a founder from an under-represented background, the right group is doing more for you than any volume of cold outreach can.

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Reason three: joining a group is better for the angel too

This is the bit that explains why groups should be the front door, not a fallback. Joining a group is genuinely better for the angel. Diligence capacity, network, and follow-on capital all go up. The signal an experienced angel gets from another experienced angel going up on a deal is real, and it's hard to replicate solo.

I'm an angel myself, and the most useful part of being in a syndicate isn't the deal flow. It's the WhatsApp group of co-investors, the sector specialists who pile in on the deals they understand, the introductions to first customers from people who actually know the buyer. None of that exists when you angel invest alone.

So the route in for a founder follows the same logic. The group lead is sitting in front of a community of motivated, well-connected angels with capital to deploy. One warm introduction from the lead does the work of fifty cold DMs.

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What to do instead

Two actions if you're raising:

1. Don't spend time building the list yourself. ThatRound's marketplace already maps the angel groups, syndicates, and funds active in the UK, and the matching surfaces the ones that fit your sector, your geography, and your stage. The UKBAA's directory is a manual alternative if you'd rather filter through yourself.
2. Approach the group lead, not the angels. A short, specific note: what you're raising, why you're a fit for that group, what's working, and why now. The group lead's job is to spot deals their members will care about. Make their job easy.

So if you're raising this quarter and you're tempted to spend the week scraping LinkedIn for individual angels, spend it instead getting in front of the right groups. That's the higher-leverage move, and it's the one the angels themselves would tell you to make.

That's why we built ThatRound. You skip the list-building, the groups get a founder pre-screened to their thesis, and the angels get curated deal flow.