Seven Spires Investment

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Seven Spires Investments Ltd. is an ‘angel’ investment fund established in 2003 with £25m of private money. It seeks to invest in early-stage, high-tech companies in the United Kingdom, such as university and industrial spinouts, start-up ventures etc. They like to work with world-class scientists and to see strong intellectual property in their investee companies. Often this will in the form of patents, but not necessarily so; they are aware that patent protection is not always to best route to defend a technology.

Seven Spires are looking for the companies that could scale to a market valuation of $100m and they will often prefer the higher risk but higher reward type of investments over smaller but more secure ones. They prefer, when possible, to be the sole or major external investor.

The £25m fund will invest up to £5 million per year over a five-year period. They have no formal minimum level of investment, though they do have a self-imposed maximum of £1 million per year for any one company; thus, ‘follow-on’ is explicitly part of our model. They are prepared to consider even extremely early stage investments - pre-revenue, perhaps even pre-prototype.

They have no particular technology sector focus, except that they would generally not expect to pursue drug-discovery opportunities. Seven Spires has a very small staff and can be very responsive as there are no tiers of management or investment committees to consult. As sole investor, they do not charge management fees, or take director’s fees, preferring that any money they invest is solely directed to growing the business. Notwithstanding this, they will not disadvantage themselves with respect to co-investors on these or other points.

The manager recommending investments to the Directors of Seven Spires Investments is Ian Page (Visiting Professor Imperial College and Founder of Oxford University spinout Celoxica Ltd). He is based in Oxford.

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