Top 10 Angel Investors for Early Stage Tech Startups
Doing a Tech startup of your own, running the business on your own terms and making profits is a dream for many founders.
While running a startup successfully is one thing but getting funded is an entirely another ball game. There are several factors that decide if a business can secure enough funding or not.
When a business starts, the founders put their own money or borrow from friends and family. This is where the business is said to be boot-strapped. Most startups being their journey in this same way. At this stage, scale isn’t the primary thing. What matters most at this stage is to keep going on profitably and keep increasing the overall sales. Here’s a break down of things that a founder should take care of at this point of time in their startup:
- Profitablity – When we talk about tech startups, making profits isn’t enough. How this profit is being made is more important. If the business is on subscription model and the churn rate is low, then this is the best and most profitable business model to look for.
When many customers signup for a small ticket size monthly payment, the business becomes more stable. Having many customers ensures that a business can not lose all the incoming money at once, on the other hand if someone has a few paying customers then a loss of a single customer will be fatal.
Team Building – Team building is important as you scale. As a founder, one can be the CEO of the company, if there are other co-founders then COO and CMO positions will be filled. However, there are several other positions that requires more people. The head of design, innovation and R&D, Social media, Human Resource, PPC and programming are various other departments where having high skilled staff is required. It is always better to build the team from the start, that way as the business grows the team too learn and grow together.
Product Market Fit – Any business needs a product that is fit for the market. There should be a huge market that the product can compete into. The pricing should be fair based on other similar products available in the market. The average order value should be high enough so that the customer acquisition costs can be balanced.
Supply-Chain – Whatever be the product you want to sell, if it isn’t available in the markets, both online and offline, your customers can not find it. From scalling manufacturing to keeping enough inventory and balancing working capital and finally placing your products in the phisical stores as well as online market places is part of the supply-chain management. If your bootstrapped startup can do all this, then you are already on the right path.
Scale – If your startup is working perfectly at a smaller scale then it is time to market it and make it bigger. This is the process where you put in money, perhaps do a monthly burn and increase production, marketing spend, sales and ultimately scale everything. Even with small numbers, if you are able to show a profitable scaling of your business, the investors will see it as an investable business.
In Tech, especially SaaS models, where expenses are almost none and customer acquisition is cheaper we look into several other metrics. Here, we look into churn rate, cost of acquisition, how customers can be upgraded into an expensive premium plan and so on. Ideally, a lean startup with monthly subscription models are best in this category.
Angles, VCs, investors – if we miss out any names, please let us know – send us an email.
From our personal research, here are the top 25 Angel investors in the Tech Startup world.
- Clark Landry – LinkedIn
Clark Landry is an Entrepreneur and an Investor who is a partner at Hawke Ventures. Based in Nashville, Clark has a particular interest in startups working in the Advertisement and Marketing Technology.
- Reid Hoffman - LinkedIn
Reid Hoffman is based in United States and has a perticular interest in AI technology. Along with several other ventures, Reid is known as the co-founder of Inflection AI. He is also an investor at Greylock which focuses on early stage startups like Seed or Pre-Seed funding.
- Fabrice Grinda – LinkedIn
Located in New York, United States, Fabrice Grinda is known for investing in a number of startups. At this moment, he is invested in over 900+ startups. Fabrice is popularly known as the founder of OLX and the founding partner of FJ labs which invests in early stage startups.
- Patrick Collison – LinkedIn
Patrick Collison resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and is the CEO of Stripe. Along with that, Patrick has invested in some early stage startups like TerraForm Industries, NewLimit etc.
- Max Levchin – LinkedIn
Max Levchin is based in San Francisco, California, United States and is the CEO and co-founder of Affirm. As an angel investor, Max has invested in some early stage tech startups like CoPilot and Bland AI.
- David Sacks – LinkedIn
David O. Sacks is a California, United States based Entrepreneur and investor who is the founder and partner at Craft Ventures. Craft Ventures is a Venture Capital firm which focuses in the startups of the SaaS sector.
- Stephanie Zhan – LinkedIn
Stephanie Zhan is a San Francisco, California, United States based Entrepreneur and investor who is a Partner at Sequoia Capital.
- Hesham Zreik – LinkedIn
Hesham Zreik is a Forbes Top 50 Angel investor from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Hesham has invested in over 400+ startups so far and is the CEO of Faster Capital.
- Edward Lando – LinkedIn
Edward Lando is a United States based Angel investor and so far he has invested in over 1000+ startups. He is the Founder of Pareto Holdings.
- Joshua Schachter - LinkedIn
Joshua Schachter is an inventor, Angel Investor and Entrepreneur from the San Francisco Bay Area. He is popularly known as the founder of Del ICIC US. Till date, Joshua has invested in over 300+ early stage seed funding startups.
We will continue upgrading this article and add more angels in this list who are working in early stage tech startups. Feel free to let us know if you have any angel suggestion for this segment and will add them to this list.