Who Are We?

We are a group of business people, professionals and entrepreneurs who enjoy the personal and financial reward of applying our money, our time, our skills and our networks to high growth businesses.

We welcome a diverse range of investment opportunities with the overriding caveat – it has to make us a lot more money than we invest!

Entrepreneurs and inventors submit their opportunities for consideration via our web site. We are strong on any sort of technology-based enterprise whether selling the technology, or just using it to deliver a competitive advantage.

Our members are interested in early-stage opportunities from concept to market expansion. Like any investor, our members employ their own portfolio strategies and diversification includes number of investments, scale of investments, maturity of investments, industry sector, technology risk and market focus.

Melbourne Angels is a founding affiliate group of the Australian Association of Angel Investors (AAAI).The AAAI offers the following definitions:

Angel means an individual person investing his/her own money and time in a company other than by way of a public stock exchange.

Angel Groups are a collection of Angels who review and evaluate deals together but, the decision to invest is made individually.

As is normal for Angel investors we tend to invest in opportunities that start close to us with a strategy to grow quickly in a large market. We consider opportunities from all over the country but, usually, we prefer interstate entrepreneurs to approach their local Angel group first. Angel groups throughout Australia routinely share deal flow.

History

Melbourne Angels was formed in Melbourne, Australia in early 2007 by a group of eight businessmen experienced as entrepreneurs and interested in pursuing Angel investment. With over thirty members and still growing, Melbourne Angels is a group of private investors who actively invest in early stage technology companies.

The group has a strong and experienced core of members that generate deal flow, are experienced in evaluation of business propositions and act as mentors for the other members and the entrepreneurs. The members vary in age and type of experience but, we all share a common passion for getting new things going. About half of us have engineering qualifications and we all have experience as successful entrepreneurs and/or Angel investors.

Members are typically active or semi-retired entrepreneurs and senior business executives who deliver value to portfolio companies through:

• financial investment;
• governance and stewardship practices learnt by having done it all before;
• management mentoring drawn from their own, hands-on management experience;
• valuable introductions through their high level business networks;
• strategic guidance refined by their collective insights; and
• the fundamental benefit of sharing lessons learned from mistakes already made.

The founding members of Melbourne Angels, prior to joining the group, had previously made investments in start-up companies in sectors including information technology, software products, semiconductor technology, web services, manufacturing and in financial and business services. As Melbourne Angels grows it intends to remain a leading Angel group in Australia, an exemplar to its peers and colleagues in Australia and internationally. The group is actively building strong alliances with other Angel groups throughout Australia and globally.

The core mission of Melbourne Angels is to provide its members with an enjoyable, supportive, collaborative environment in which to share investments, knowledge and networks, all while having some fun.