Top Performers

In this episode of the Angel Insights podcast, Angel6's founder, Alister Esam, sits down with Tom Britton to talk about what actually drives investment decisions.

In this episode, Angel6's founder, Alister Esam, shares with Philip Smith what really drives successful start-up investing, from spotting patterns across hundreds of deals to why traction matters more than ideas. They discuss founder traits, funding trade-offs, and the reality behind 10x returns and failed investments.

Founders love big valuations for the same reason toddlers love sugar. It feels incredible. Right up until it doesn’t. If you’re an early-stage company, growing fast, and a VC turns up offering a huge valuation, it’s easy to think you’ve cracked it. That this is “winning”. But here’s the part most people learn too late: Valuation is a headline. Terms are the truth. One term, in particular, can turn a great-looking deal into a trapdoor. It’s usually called downside protection .

(and why the government is right to offer it) Let’s stop pretending otherwise. EIS is one of the most generous tax breaks the UK government offers to individuals. Not “helpful”, not “nice to have”, generous ad borderline outrageous! And very deliberately so. Before the usual muttering about “tax dodgers” starts — pause. EIS isn’t a loophole. It isn’t clever accounting. It’s a policy choice. The government saying: “We want more private money flowing into the messiest, riskiest

Angel investing in the UK has a peculiar feature: you can lose money in a way that feels tax-efficient. That’s not useless. But it is dangerous. It’s led to a habit of investing because something is EIS or SEIS eligible, rather than because it’s a good business at a sensible price. EIS should be treated like air conditioning in a hire car: nice to have, not the reason you picked it. So how do I actually value a start-up? Not with anything exotic. No spreadsheets projecting wi

EIS and SEIS are among the most generous legal tax incentives the UK offers investors. Used properly, they can make early-stage investing genuinely asymmetric: meaningful upside, cushioned downside. Used badly, they do what paracetamol does after a big night out. They reduce the pain — they don’t undo the damage. The rule never changes: if you back companies that fail, you lose money. Tax relief just means you sometimes lose less. Tax relief is the icing, the cake is backing

In the UK start-up ecosystem, there’s a familiar funding arc. You raise from angels, then from UK VCs, and if things go well enough, someone eventually says: “We’re getting interest from the US.” For founders, it feels like validation. For early investors, it feels like acceleration. For the business, it can feel like the moment everything changes, and often it does, because US capital usually comes with two things the UK struggles to match: larger cheques and higher valuatio

In a world filled with subscriptions, utilities, broadband contracts and hidden fees, many people end up spending more time than they should wrestling with household finances. The Bunch saw that everyday administrative burden not as a nuisance, but as a sizeable market opportunity — and built a platform to simplify how households manage, set up and pay their bills. From its beginnings as a student-focused start-up to a high-growth utility-management platform used by thousand

In an era when work is increasingly distributed and the corridors of spontaneous office interaction have vanished, companies struggle to replicate the informal conversations that bind teams, spark ideas and surface unfiltered sentiment. Natter set out to solve that problem — and, in doing so, has built a new category at the intersection of employee engagement, organisational intelligence and real-time conversation data. What began as a vision to digitally recreate the “water

In a world where people move more frequently, live in smaller spaces, and increasingly prioritise sustainability, traditional furniture ownership no longer fits the lifestyle of many modern consumers. Enter Homebound — a startup that turns that shift into a scalable business opportunity by redefining how furniture is accessed, used, and valued. What began as a solution to a personal pain point has grown into a rapidly expanding Furniture as a Service (FaaS) platform, backed

In businesses today teams can’t afford fragmented HR systems, manual spreadsheets, and disconnected workflows. Peopleforce emerged with a bold mission: turn HR from a collection of chores into a seamless, data-driven engine that empowers people and drives organisational performance. What began as a response to HR complexity has evolved into one of the fastest-growing all-in-one HR platforms in the global SaaS landscape — a journey that investors should take seriously. Foundi

In a world where financial data is often scattered across accounts, pensions, savings, credit cards and mortgages, Moneyhub is quietly building the plumbing that makes sense of it all. More than a data-aggregator, it’s a regulated open-finance platform — blending data, compliance and payments to help banks, pension firms, insurers and lenders deliver truly personalised services, while boosting efficiency and growth. For investors, Moneyhub represents the kind of fintech infra

Every investor loves a founder who has lived the problem they’re solving. Ryft is one of the clearest examples I’ve seen. What started as a marketplace pain-point has grown into one of the UK’s most compelling payments-infrastructure stories — and the pace of their progress since raising capital has been nothing short of impressive. This isn’t a story about payments. It’s a story about infrastructure built from real-world frustration , and why investors should pay attention.