A lot of you will have heard of a government scheme called Seed EIS, or Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme, which is honestly a fairly decent programme that makes it more attractive for angel investors to put money into a startup businesses. Pretty much every coach or advisor you will talk to will tell you about this scheme.
Luckily, because it’s a government scheme, we get some pretty good data published against this scheme, including a report from May this year.
Now I’m not going to go through the whole thing, but there is a standout ODDITY about this report, which is that 67% of the total SEIS investment went to businesses in London and the South East. Just under 50% went to London itself.
To be even-handed, 25% of the population lives in this area – i.e. there’s about a 2.5x skew in this data.
So what does that mean if you are trying to raise money and you are not based in London and the south east? It certainly suggests you are at a disadvantage, and I wonder why that is, and I wonder what you do about that.