August 2020 | Angel Investment Network Blog

#BehindtheRaise with BorrowMyDoggy

We spoke to BorrowMyDoggy founder Rikke Rosenlund about disrupting the dog-sitting market, overcoming challenges during COVID and dos and don’ts in approaching angel investors. You’d be barking mad not to read on.

Tell us about BorrowMyDoggy?
BorrowMyDoggy is an online platform connecting dog owners with borrowers. People sign up, create a profile, write a little bit about themselves or their dog and then they’re able to take a look at the suitable matches in their area. Matches are based on location and availability, and it’s all about getting to know each other really well before sharing the dog.

For owners, it is a way of finding a trusted local dog lover to take care of your dog when you can’t. You can rest assured they will treat your dog like family. For borrowers it is a chance to have a dog in your life by spending time with one and helping out owners at the same time. Dogs also get more exercise, attention and most importantly, love. It’s a win-win! It could be someone who has just had a baby who might need someone to help take care of their dog. They might be connected with someone who has a five year old but can’t commit to the full time commitment, but has a dog void in their life. Every match is very different.

What does it cost?
£12.99 per years for borrowers and £44.99 per year for owners and all the members are verified and covered by insurance. They have 24/7 vet access. No money is exchanged between borrowers and owners, as borrowing is based on the love of dogs rather than for a profit.

How have you overcome challenges during COVID?
Of course it has been challenging. We put a notification at the start of the crisis to say don’t meet someone else from another household, although there were some exceptional circumstances. What has been truly heartwarming is seeing the community come together. During COVID we’ve seen different members of our community perform selfless acts, for example delivering medication to other members who were self isolating.

Overall the interest in dogs has surged during COVID and many more people are looking at owning them. However it is important that people understand the cost and time commitment of having a dog. 97% of dog owners underestimate the cost, which is £21-£33,000 over its lifetime. A lot more people have got dogs during lockdown but a lot of people are going back to the office. There is also separation anxiety to consider.

Why did you decide to raise investment?
We wanted to grow our platform further, both acquiring new members and also optimize the product and make the platform better. The extra investment means more staff and technical work on the platform and customer acquisition.

What are your top tips for anyone raising investment for the first time?
Firstly understand it is a process that can take time and not something you can do over night. Make sure you understand investors. This means do your due diligence on interested parties. Also have someone review the investor deck so you can get feedback on the material. Finally check a crowdfunding platform if you want an idea of top investor questions. I would also look at the top questions you would expect and have answers ready for them.

What attracted investors to your company?
The dog sitting market is worth over £1 billion. This is something we are trying to disrupt and we really are the first of the kind. It is also helped that many investors are dog lovers. They could ‘get it’ instinctively and understand it would be great to have something looking after their dog. The other key thing that appealed was the product. We are a large community, we have some really strong numbers. A lot of our investors had heard about the platform.

What has been good for acquisition?
Online acquisition, PR and world of mouth has been great. We also have an engaged community who are happy to recommend us.

My biggest fundraising mistake was…
Historically realising how long it can take to raise funding. You need to be prepared that it may be longer, especially when it is the first time. For example with angel groups, they don’t necessarily meet that often. Even with a crowdfunding platform there is a lot of work to get a pitch ready and then the closing off of the investment round.

Any other advice?
Understand who has the capacity to follow on relatively easily if the company requires more money. Checking out the record of the investor is a good way of doing this. How do they add value to the company? Do they have a network they can introduce you to? Also, do you have good chemistry with the investor? It’s like getting married, because it’s hard to get divorced!

Why did you choose to use Angel Investment Network?
A friend raised funding for the network and thought it was really easy to use. I found it straightforward to see what was required to get a pitch live and the team is very nice.

Edtech startup BibliU raises more than £600,000 with support from Angel Investment Network

Edtech startup BibliU recently raised more than £600,000 as part of a Series A extension funding round, supported by AIN. The raise received widespread media coverage across the business, startup and education press.

London-based BibliU is a digital education platform that provides students with digital access to their textbooks and libraries across all their devices. The campaign funding round, an addition to its £6.5m Series A, was in response to a surge in demand due to COVID 19. Completed in eight weeks, the funds will be used for new technical hires to support demand from Universities. The startup is scaling rapidly with 60+ new pilots across the globe.

Founded in 2014, the company now has over 100 university customers including Oxford, Imperial, University of Phoenix and Coventry University. The company has digitised content from more than 2,000 publishers including: Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press. The content is licensed directly to universities, who can then provide access to students and include the costs in their existing tuition fees.

According to David Sherwood, CEO and co-founder of BibliU: “BibliU has seen rapid growth across the globe over the last few months, and we believe COVID has pulled the transition to digital learning forward by at least 5 years. We have always existed to assist universities with this transition, by providing an unmatched student experience in a cost-effective way. BibliU is the perfect intersection for universities that are looking to create a seamless distance-learning experience, and do so in a way that introduces operational efficiencies to their workflows. We’re thrilled that AIN was able to assist us in this rapid extension to our Series A, and are excited to see where this round takes us.”

According to Sam Louis from Angel Investment Network, who led the raise: “BibliU sits at a fantastic intersection of traditional learning structures and digital evolution. The business has broad reaching applications, a strong business model and most importantly, it delivers real value to its users. EdTech is a tough area to gain real traction and I think what BibliU has stands apart from many of the others which is why we’ve seen such great uptake from investors. The COVID lockdowns have now accelerated adoption of digital learning and hopefully this will lead the way for more sustained growth in the EdTEch space and of BibliU.”

If you would like to see what other companies are up to on Angel Investment Network, or are interested in raising funding yourself, you can find your local network here.

#BehindtheRaise with WeCoffee

We spoke to Ben Carew, Co-Founder at We Coffee, about how to complete a successful fundraise, and also equally important, what not to do.

WeCoffee aims to provide flexible and affordable workspace for post Covid working, along with curated events.

Tell us about WeCoffee:

WeCoffee was created to make working from anywhere something anyone could enjoy.

By curating a distributed network of free and unique workspaces and a community you can cowork with online and in real life, we believe we are well on the way to achieving this.

Why did you decide to raise investment?

We decided to raise investment so that we could bring our unique and exciting model for coworking to the whole world. Something that mine and my business partner’s lifetime savings wouldn’t quite allow, at least at the speed with which we want to do it.

People often ask why the speed and scale matters and for us we see a window of opportunity, while the world’s ways of working are changing, to allow a better social norm.

We believe for too long the standards have been set by employers with outdated policies, or more recently landlords hijacking the term coworking only to supply fixed office space as a service.

We want to make sure that the future of work will give power and choice back to the worker, ensuring a happier and more productive worklife.

What is your top tip for anyone raising investment for the first time?

I’m going to be cheeky here and give a few:

Angel investors are people not ATMs, understand them and make them feel confident and safe with you by treating them how you would like to be
Be firm on your timeline, if you don’t have one set one
Don’t be shy to check they actually want to invest, not just introduce you
Treat it as near to a full time job as you can. Maybe 50% off the time, as yes you need to run a business.
As soon as you have a yes, add them to the term sheet. Its less scary to follow someone else
If VCs keep being really nice but don’t invest your probably too early. Save yourself the time and build more traction and try and do an Angel round or friends and family
Be flexible in what your raising, if you get half can you make a business or the next step? If double what would you do?
Don’t be scared to say no. We met one total **** who was incredibly aggressive, wanted to force a board member who was an ex-founder removed from the company by their shareholders for negligence, thought WeWork’s IPO would go through and that only 8 banks failed in the 2008 crisis. We were very happy to not molly his coddle
Lastly join WeCoffee as there are lots of us on or who have been on this journey. We are more than happy to help one another avod the ****, find the right investors and generally navigate the startup world.

What attracted investors to your company?

You would probably have to ask them, but I think a big part of it was the total and utter passion that is born out of us as a team. We clearly know and love what we do, so if you believe in the idea that we won’t all work in an office 5 days a week, there is no better horse to back.

My biggest fundraising mistake was…

It took me some time to realise that I needed to run it like any other business activity, as a structured process. I spent months pitching at intermittent events and meetings waiting for my angel to land in lap not realising what I was doing was practising.

I was at the wrong events, with no real investors; and worse meetings with the wrong people who were more interested in introductions than investing.

Once I sat down, opened the round in SeedLegals, got all my deliverables in place, built a sales funnel and set a firm date to close the round then I was well on the way.

Why did you choose to use Angel Investment Network?

I used AIN as it came across to meet my target investors (angels), as it had a wealth of investors that I could filter for by sector. Insanely helpful!

If it wasn’t for you Angel Investment Network we wouldn’t have raised as much as we did.

Keen to hear more?

Try out one of WeCoffee’s online networking events to meet ‘creatives, marketing gurus, product creators, free thinkers, entrepreneurs, tech geeks, doers and dreamers’.

Sign up here for a 100% discount, i.e free entry.

#SixtySecondStartUp with Pharma Sentinel

We caught up with Rav Roberts, CEO of Pharma Sentinel to hear his plans for their new ‘Medsii’ app, which makes it easy to discover if your medicines have unsafe side effects, give allergic reactions or have been recalled for safety reasons.

What does your company do?

Pharmasentinel.com is a pioneering B2C2B healthtech, leveraging AI to provide our users with trusted, timely and tailored medicines and medical conditions (mental health, diabetes, skin conditions) news, information, alerts and related content such as video podcasts, live streaming.

We also give 10% of our profits to patient-support charities such as Bipolar UK & the British Menopause Society, as chosen by our users. We launch with our consumer app called Medsii (medicines information for me) in 4 weeks time, yikes!

Why did you set up this company?

Our Chief Scientific Officer Nasir (a Co-Founder) used to work for the UK’s medicines regulator (the Department of Health) and noticed a big gap in the market for timely medicines information, e.g. drug safety alerts & recalls, clinical trial results & opportunities.

I also suffer from Diabetes, as does my mother, and our research showed that 46% of the UK’s population (29 million people) take at least 1 repeat prescription for a chronic condition. It’s not all elderly people either, as 50% of women in their 40s do so.

How did you get your first customer?

We haven’t yet, already we have many friends and family who take regular medicines lined up to try the app. It’s completely free to use and has a very engaging ‘Twitter’ style interface, so why not give it a go?!

We knew we were onto something when?

When we realised the Total Addressable Market and Serviceable Obtainable Markets were huge; many people use Google (over 1 billion health related searches a day, but results include ads, links to blogs) and even social media for important medicines info, but that could contain wrong or misleading results; no one helps people by linking them to patient support group charities for help;

No one provides personalised, relevant, trusted medicines & conditions info via easy to understand push alerts. I have used our product in testing to warn me against drinking grapefruit juice with one of my medicines as it’s extremely dangerous!

Our business model:

1. We launch with our consumer App called Medsii (Medicines information for me), which will collect 1st party data on users in a GDPR compliant way (side effects, locations, medicines/conditions liked, followed, shared, saved) and which already has its own data, e.g. clinical trial results.
2. We augment this 1st party data with 3rd party data.
3. Our data platform runs machine-learning algos to identify patterns and predict future events, e.g. the probability of a drug that has passed a phase 1 clinical trial eventually being approved, and roughly when.
4. We sell this data-as-a service to businesses, e.g. pharmaceuticals, insurance, financial analysts even companies like Unilever and Chanel (who will be interested in the skin condition data insight we’ve collected). Note that we also monetise our consumer App (subscriptions, in-app purchases and advertising (no drug ads though!).

Our most effective marketing channel has been:

Without a doubt, Facebook. Not only are billions of a target customers there, but we can micro-target them with custom and lookalike audiences and even better, they have people who walk you through how to do it really well! (Fiverr also has some great marketers on there).

LinkedIn is really good for engaging with business people (for our B2B products) and Twitter is great for linking up with angel and VC investors, all over the world!

What we look for when recruiting:

Passion, integrity, evidence of continuous learning (even following people on Twitter to learn more about a particular subject), desire to help other people less fortunate and ideally EVIDENCE that they’ve actually done it (e.g. volunteering to help the elderly or doing a fun run to raise money for breast cancer etc).. We run a very flat organisation and we were all virtual even before Coronavirus hit!

The biggest mistake that I’ve made is:

So many really. I guess my biggest was in my first startup in San Francisco: We had a great product but I didn’t think about our go-to-market and distribution strategy, i.e. how to get and increase traction (users, usage) for our online gaming products.

We think that there’s growth in this sector because:

Even before coronavirus hit, more and more people were taking repeat medicines for chronic conditions and with people living longer, this means several decades. There has also been a large theme about fake news on social media, where millions get their medicines info from.

But now with Coronavirus, people more than ever before want trusted, timely medicines and medical conditions information that is relevant & readable (unlike the patient information leaflets that come with their pills!).

Keen to hear more?

If you would like to see what other companies are up to on Angel Investment Network, or are interested in raising funding yourself, you can find your local network here.