The Ice Angels

At last week's Entrepreneur's meeting, I had a 10 minute 'speed date' with Mike Murphy of the Ice Angels.

The ICE Angels are a network of private angel investors brought together by The ICEHOUSE to facilitate investment in early stage companies, providing structure to the deal revision process and benefiting from scale economies in sourcing deal flow. That's their words, not mine.....

Now my words. They do a great job at providing qualified 'start-ups' with advice on becoming investment ready and then, in some cases, backing those start-ups with their own money. In NZ, Ice Angels are an important source of 'start-up' funding.

What struck me though was the scale of the Ice Angels funding v the demand from innovative NZ start-ups v the availability of other funding sources in NZ. The comparison was made more acute by a lunch I had had two weeks before in Auckland with Investment NZ and a US-based venture capital lawyer. The contrast was sharp. I think there were perhaps more funding sources in the lawyer's single block in Palo Alto than are available throughout the whole of New Zealand. The contrast was that great.

Ice Angels provide a great model for start up investment. New Zealand needs more angels like them.