Individual angel investors, angel funds and other seed stage investment funds are key players in the VANTEC angel community. The landscape is changing with the addition of female focused investor groups, themed seed stage funds (Health, Agrifood, Climate Change), crowdfunding platforms that allows non accredited investors and young medium and high income professionals to invest in seed stage companies. The investment lens increasingly includes socially responsible investing (SRI) considerations of environmental, social and governance (ESG), United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG's), or Climate Change goals (Drawdown). This is especially the case for younger "Millennial" investors, family offices and foundations which are often impact first vs business first.

We are looking to update our view of the seed stage investment landscape so we can better understand how our shifting stakeholder landscape and target audience of prospective angel investors - whether they be individuals or angel funds - perceive our brand and competitors. We want to develop clarity on our competitive advantages and optimize our marketing and business strategy and increase our impact in the community

This project will include:

• An identification and profile of current seed stage and next stage investment funds in our local community (i.e. province of British Columbia)
• The creation of a matrix identifying features shared across the angel investment funds and those that are different.
• A summary of 2-4 paragraphs describing our competitive advantages and disadvantages relative to the competition identified. This could be done in the form of a SWOT analysis.

We will give you access to organizational assets to support this project such as personnel, website analytics, sales and brand collateral, and more. We can suggest names of competitors to research.

Objective

We hope to gain a comprehensive understanding of the angel investment funds in our space and how we can co-invest and/or collaborate through our product/service offering, and our messaging.

VANTEC is often the first place where early stage companies present to investors, after accelerator demo days and entrepreneur focused events. After companies raise their first $1-2M from grants and angel seed rounds (or in some cases crowd funding), 1-2 years later they may also raise capital from aligned foreign investors and funds. There may be an opportunity for VANTEC to play a facilitating role to connect companies to aligned next stage investors.