Fundraising: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, for tech company startups looking to attract investment.

A concise and compelling webinar on Raising investment, covering the essential guide to capturing the attention of any potential investors, including both VCs and Corporate Venture Capital funds.

The unprecedented uncertainty in 2020 has turned start-up fundraising on its head. Many early stage companies are left wondering how they can continue to grow their business when access to capital is seemingly frozen. Some VCs have certainly hit the brakes, but others have taken another tack, they are looking for strong investment opportunities as they have effectively missed an investment quarter. A percentage of their funds have been deployed to support their portfolio companies, they have a wall of cash they need to invest, or return to their LPs. So, whilst the investment bar may be higher, it’s also a good time to go to market, however, its now more important than ever to attract high quality investment. This starts with a successful strategy to capture an investors attention.

These are uncertain times, but we remain very busy on both funding and exit mandates and have closed 5 deals in lockdown.

We will be covering: The Investment Deck – hitting the investor hot buttons, Term Sheets, IP and in addition, we are delighted that Fliss Berridge, Co-founder of payments company, Ordo who will be joining us to share her story on how she navigated the challenges of fundraising and overcame all hurdles to secure funding from Nationwide Ventures.

All moderated by, Nick Sturge, MBE and the long-standing former Centre Director at SETsquared Bristol and Director of The Engine Shed, the global no 1 university business incubator, with over 4,000 companies incubated and £1.8bn+ raised with SETsquared help.

Agenda

15:00 Nick Sturge, MBE Welcome

15:05 Overview of the Investment Process, Monica Shupikai SImmons, ICON

15:15 IP issues, Sarah Kenshall, Burges Salmon

15:25 Term Sheets, Alex Lloyd, Burges Salmon

15:35 Ordo's journey to investment, Fliss Berridge, Ordo

15:50 Q&A

16:00 Close

Speakers Bios:

Nick Sturge, MBE

Nick is the long-standing former Director of Engine Shed and Centre Director at SETsquared Bristol , the global #1 university business incubator, with over 4,000 companies incubated and £1.8bn+ raised with SETsquared help. Success stories include, Cyber skills platform Immersive Labs who raised a total of $48m, with Series B led by Summit and Goldman Sachs, to fuel expansion into the US. And breakthrough haptic technology company, UltraLeap who raised $85.9m secured from Japanese investors, Cornes Technologies, San Francisco based Dolby Family Ventures, UK’s IP Group and Mayfair Private Equity, the funding was raised to fuel UltraLeaps global expansion and its entry into virtual and augmented reality markets.

Previously, Nick co-founded a technology business that listed on Ofex in 1996 and the main list of the LSE in 2000 and is now an angel investor, non-exec chair and consultant on business ecosystems.

Fliss Berridge
Fliss is Director and Co-founder of payments company Ordo. In her life before Ordo, she was part of the leadership team at the Faster Payments Scheme which ran all online and mobile payments in the UK.During her time at Faster Payments, she helped opened up the payment system to more than double the number of banks and building societies that could offer their customers immediate online and mobile payments. And shaped a new model that allowed non-bank type companies to offer instant and secure online and mobile payments too – all these companies were trying to find ways to serve their customers. As the legend goes, Fliss waited in a local cafe one day for Ordo to be incorporated, and now, after a couple of years spent researching, testing, building, a bit more sitting in cafes and head-scratching over ideas both good and bad, we’ve got Ordo – secure instant payments, and invoice and payment tracking at a glance, giving everyone the flexibility and control to feel completely on top of their finances, all the time and in real time, wherever they are…and it’s super easy to use.

Monica Shupikai Simmons,
Monica is a Director at ICON focusing on M&A and raising equity finance for high growth technology companies, with a focus on FinTech. She spent over five years at Deloitte providing management consulting and corporate finance advice, following over six years at PwC providing financial advisory services to their respective financial services clients in both London and New York. Her deals include the sale of payments company Beyonic Inc. to African giant, MFS Africa.

Alex Lloyd
Alex is a senior associate at Burges Salmon’s corporate team and works in all areas of corporate finance. He acts for national and international, private and public companies and institutional investors across multiple sectors. Alex has a particular focus on technology and communications and renewable energy. Deals include advising Embark in relation to the launch of ‘Vested’ its new employee benefits consulting joint venture with Mazars.

Sarah Kenshall
Sarah leads Burges Salmon’s cross-departmental fintech practice and is a director in the firm's Technology and Communications team. She has been involved in advising on evolving technologies for over 15 years, including work on high profile transformational project procurements, platform agreements, structuring business models for commercialising new technologies, advising on commercial delivery and providing practical risk analysis and guidance, most recently in the realms of smart technologies, data privacy and cloud.Much of Sarah's work is international in nature and she specialises in multi-party, multi-jurisdiction licensing and implementing solutions.

Date: Wednesday, 29 Jul 2020
Start Time: 3.00pm
End Time: 4.00pm
Address: Webinar – Preparing for Investment