Angel group renews investment deal with NZVIF

27 March 2012

Australasia’s largest angel group renews investment deal with NZVIF

Australasia’s largest and most active angel investment group – Auckland’s ICE Angels – plans to invest around $10 million into New Zealand start-ups in partnership with the New Zealand Venture Investment Fund over the next five years.

Through their initial investment partnership, Ice Angels and NZVIF invested $8 million into 12 companies over the last four years. ICE Angels has now renewed the co-investment partnership, which sees NZVIF committing to invest up to $4 million into companies being selected and invested into by ICE Angel members.

ICE Angels Chairman Brian Casey said Ice Angels is a significant investor in New Zealand start-ups and is the largest and most active angel network in Australasia.

“Since our establishment in 2003, we have grown to over 100 members who have collectively invested more than $30 million in 33 companies over 60 rounds. We have invested into successful companies like Green Button, Inro, Nexus6, BigLittleBang and BioMatters.

“ICE Angels’ investors are particularly interested in early stage ventures with international growth potential within sectors including software, media, internet, communications, life sciences, and medical devices.

“New Zealand needs to grow young technology companies and turn them into world-leaders. We need to be developing the talent, networks and capital to make it possible. Angel investing provides start-ups with all three of those. The more capital we can deploy into the eco-system, the more likely that some of these companies will reach their potential.”

NZVIF chief executive Franceska Banga said the co-investing partnership is helping to fund the growth of promising young technology companies like Green Button, whose application provides access to supercomputer processing power, and Inro, a developer of robotic forklifts.

“We are keen to maintain the momentum of investment into these sorts of start-up companies. Combined NZVIF’s share with the private angel investment, we can expect that the renewed partnership should see around $10 million of investment into start-ups over the next four to five years.

“Across the 14 angel groups we have partnered with, NZVIF has co-invested into 70 young companies since the Seed Fund was established in 2006. We estimate that these and other angel investors in NZ will have at least invested into that number again over that period, meaning there are around 140 to 150 companies in the pipeline of emerging technology companies. Providing the capital to enable them to continue to grow is a challenge, but it is exciting for the development of New Zealand’s high growth company sector.”

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