Amping Up the Local Angel Investing Scene

If you are an accredited investor and interested in the Golden Seeds mission of funding and promoting start-ups founded by women, we'd like to invite you to attend one of our forum meetings to see what we are all about. Anyone interested should contact me at ajb@goldenseeds.com.

Anita Brearton
Golden Seeds
Boston

It would be nice to locate a forum where those having ideas can get some help, expose those ideas to potentially interested parties/investors. I'm sure there are many pre-seed and seed stage entrepreneurs who dont fit into the mold.. but with some backing..

I use, for example, ME!
As one example of several I could share, I have acquired over the years dozens of quality "New England" domains at www.NewEnglandDomains.com, names that represent nearly every aspect of our life & economy here in New England, a region I might add, that has about 30 times the population of "Boston"... I would love to get some help in turning these sites into a regional portal. Then we can stop hearing about the demise of media in our area.

A few dozen others at www.FontainesDomains.com.

I'd be ashamed at the self promotion, but isn't the premise of the article basically about helping connect investors to the ideas? And visa versa..

This is great information and I would LOVE to find out more about this. As an entrepreneur with a live business concern (a web design/development company) and a startup we're incubating out of this existing business, Angel money is a very attractive consideration for us. As noted, the number of Angel groups in the area is truly impressive but finding a less formal venue while still attracting numbers of Angels is always a challenge.

Check out MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge (http://www.mitforumcambridge.org/) for startup events. Also check out MyEventGuru.com for other start up and other business related events in Boston.

Like the rest of the economy, angel groups have contracted somewhat, but are very much alive, and New England enjoys a vibrant constellation of them. Besides the above mentioned, Beacon Angels meets here in Boston. Walnut and Boston Harbor meet at Babson College in Wellesley. Hub, founded in 2000, meets in Cambridge (I think). To the west, we have Boynton in Worcester and River Valley in Springfield. To our north are Granite State in Hanover and Ecoast in Portsmouth, NH, as well as Maine Angels. In Rhode Island are Cherrystone.

-Bill Swiggart, Manager, Beacon Angels, LLC

Thanks for highlighting Golden Seeds, Scott. Jill Preotle and Jean Hammond are wonderful investors who really work hard for their companies, including mine! I think the world of their business savvy and deep, deep investor experience.

Good pickup in talking to Larry Gennari too...he has a terrific reputation in town...his name keeps coming up in my travels and people have nothing but good things to say about his contributions to the entrepreneurial community.

To: Oversights and Omissions Department:
MA Medical Angels ["MA2"] was founded in the depths of recession, the end of last year, to focus exclusively on life science opportunities, our state's premier natural resource. We hold a "floating meeting" approximately once a month at one of the various premier research institutions around the city. MA2 just led a $2.2M financing of Daktari Inc, a point of care device for determining white blood cell count in global health settings. Investor interest has been very high as we benefit from a combination of locally produced intellectual property with a concentration of entrepreneurial talent. Over 150 individuals have attended our meetings to date. We rush in where conventional VCs fear to tread into the pre-clinical valley of death.
www.massmedangels.com

Agreed. MA2 is experiencing a wonderful ground swell and putting to work the tremendous collective wisdom in the health sciences arena that Greater Boston has to offer. We're excited about Daktari and there are more great companies in the line-up.

And, as a new Golden Seeds member, I am already benefitting from the wisdom of Jean, Jill and the team. Thanks for mentioning them in the above post, Jules.

Scott - in addition to angels, who play a very important part in funding seed and pre-seed stage companies, we also have some "institutional" seed investors as well here in the greater Boston area. Groups like Launch Capital, Founders Collective, et al are institutional (i.e. full-time professionally managed firms investing on behalf of limited partners) but invest small amounts rather early on in a company's development.

Lee