Christmas has come early for entrepreneurs at London’s Cass Business School. The Cass Entrepreneurs Network (CEN), a community of students, alumni and investors, has called on angels to help fund the school’s start-up ventures.
Angel investors from the £10 million Cass Entrepreneurship Fund, and London-based investment funds Saatchinvest and Mustard Seed, which focuses on social impact, will invest up to £100,000 in start-ups which pitch at CEN’s annual competition.
Some 15 businesses will pitch their ideas to investors, whom are particularly interested in start-ups operating in the advertising and technology sectors.
Parveen Dhanda, president of CEN, said that the network is important to help alumni from Cass and City University London, its base, with both funding and advice.
“This pitching competition will do both because even if companies are at an early stage, our angels will provide feedback on their pitch to help them in future,” she added.
Many business schools are now running these competitions to cater for an increasing number of MBA and masters students who want to launch entrepreneurial ventures.
By establishing on-campus venture capital funds, business schools are able to accelerate promising students’ companies. The Cass Entrepreneurship Fund has invested cash into MBA graduates’ start-ups including Bet Buddy, a supplier of user data analytics software for gaming companies, that was founded by former Barclays banker Simo Dragicevic.
Access to funding, particularly in Europe, is cited as one of the biggest hurdles to start-up success. By engaging the local venture capital and angel funding community, Cass is able to offer students a platform from which to compete for cash.
Saatchinvest, a fund specialising in tech which typically invests up to £400,000, has previously invested in Cass venture Comparabien, a fast-growing Latin-American price comparison website founded by two EMBA students.
Other notable investments include a $500,000 injection into Ometria, a London-based e-commerce intelligence company, and an investment in Citymapper, the public transportation app, which went on to raise $10 million in a funding round led by venture capital firm Balderton Capital.
Mustard Seed, co-founded by Stanford GSB MBA Alex Pitt, has close links to UK-based business schools Cambridge Judge, Imperial College, London Business School and Oxford Saïd, as well as INSEAD. Its portfolio of investments includes a capital injection into Crowdsurfer, the crowdfunding and peer-to-peer-lending analytics dashboard, which received investment after winning last year’s CEN competition.
Emily Mackay, CEO of Crowdsurfer, said that the company raised nearly £250,000 in its initial round of funding, led by angel investors she met at CEN’s pitching competition in 2013.
She added: “The competition was an opportunity to meet professional angels that specialised in finance, who are also highly committed to socially motivated businesses. As a result we now have proprietary technology, over 200 data feeds from platforms worldwide, 180 million data points, and a team of eight.”