Investor & Startup News from Dealum

​[[{"value":" Most demo days ask investors to travel, give up a full day and sit through a single city's batch of companies. This virtual demo day takes two and a half hours, costs nothing and brings together startups from several countries in one session. What happens on the day? The programme runs from 9:00 to 11:30 Pacific Time, which is 12:00 to 14:30 in Eastern Time. PT ET Session 9:00 12:00 Opening remarks and ecosystem vision 9:10 12:10 Panel discussion, moderated by Alex Mojtahedi, Founder and CEO of Peachscore 9:55 12:55 New partner announcements 10:00 13:00 Startup recognition and award 10:15 13:15 15 startup pitches 11:30 14:30 Closing remarks How to join The event is free and online. Registration is on Luma and requires host approval, so submit your request early rather than on the day. Request to join the Demo Day Where these startups come from Dealum and Peachscore launched the Data-Driven Accelerator in November 2024. It is equity-free and fully virtual, built for early-stage founders who...

​[[{"value":" How I run my angel portfolio with Dealum's Investor Plus I don't invest only for the money, and I'm not unusual in that. My own research with angel investors shows that most of us are not in it purely for financial return, especially those of us who invest directly. For me, two things also matter. I champion founders, and I back businesses that do good. I only invest where I can see a positive social impact, and I want to be genuinely useful to the founders I back. Early stage investing is illiquid. I can't sell a share when I'm worried or have an unexpected expense, and most of the companies I back won't have a meaningful valuation event for years. So I gave up trying to measure my portfolio the way a public market investor would. Instead, I measure what I can act on. Does this company need my help? Does it need money? Is it still on track, and still doing the good it set out to do? Is there a decision waiting for me, a follow-on, a consent, a tax filing? And sometimes the hardest one: has it...

​[[{"value":" The first three posts were about the data. This one’s about what we think it means, and what we’re building at Dealum because of it. Data from 12,000+ funding rounds, 180+ angel networks Here’s the pattern we recognised. Of the funded companies we can see, only just over one in ten ever reaches an exit. Most of the money that went in is still tied up. And when an exit does come, it often arrives years after the last funding round, well after everyone had stopped paying attention. The easy conclusion is that most startups just aren’t good enough to buy. We don’t think that’s right. We think they’ve simply not found the right buyer. The companies are there, and the buyers who’d value them are there too. They just have no reliable way of finding each other. That’s a distribution problem, not a quality one — and it’s the gap we’ve decided to close. It’s also a bigger gap than the companies we’ve been writing about. SERIES The mid-market exit route Part 4 of 4 Close to nine in ten funded startups...

​[[{"value":" You don't have to be rich to become an angel investor This is an edited version of the talk I gave at the Investors Alliance Forum on 10 September 2026. I'm Vicky Brock, a five-time founder turned angel investor. I am not a billionaire. Sadly, I am not even a millionaire — my average first investment into a company is typically only about €7,000. Maybe it's my British-born arrogance. Maybe it's an entrepreneur's delusion. Either way, I am completely convinced that with your help I can still amplify potential and change the world for the better. It is simpler than you might think. Small actions need to happen at scale This forum already recognises that talk is not enough and awareness is not enough. Actions matter more than good intentions. But my handful of investments, on their own, are not enough either. Small actions like mine need to happen at scale to have real impact. None of us can do this alone. More than ever before in my lifetime, our communities, our regions and our local economies...

​[[{"value":" Most people start in the wrong place. They look at the companies still raising, still posting hype, still visible. That's a reasonable instinct and it's almost exactly backwards. To see why, it helps to look at what our data says about time. SERIES The mid-market exit route Part 3 of 4 Close to nine in ten funded startups never record an exit. The industry plans around the exception and rarely asks what happens to the rest, most of which are working businesses with paying customers. This part puts a number on the gap, using 12,000+ funding rounds logged by the investors who wrote the cheques. PART 1 The exit is the exception: what 12,000 funding rounds say about startup liquidity PART 2 Why mid-market companies are the missing piece in the startup exit puzzle PART 3: YOU'RE HERE The companies nobody's watching: what happens after the funding stops PART 4: COMING SOON What we're building at Dealum: connecting startups with the companies that should be working with them Close to nine in ten...

​[[{"value":" We’re pleased to announce that Dealum has partnered with the UK Business Angels Association (UKBAA). Through the partnership, UKBAA’s DealShare platform will now be powered by Dealum, providing its member community with a dedicated space to share and discover investment opportunities. UKBAA is the national trade association for angel and early-stage investment in the UK. It represents over 590 members who collectively deploy more than £2bn annually, including angel groups, individual investors, early-stage VCs, equity platforms, family offices, universities and accelerators. As a not-for-profit run by and for its members, UKBAA works to connect the investment ecosystem across the UK. The problem the partnership addresses Angel investing depends heavily on collaboration, but sharing opportunities across different groups and networks can be fragmented. Each organisation has its own processes and systems, making it harder for relevant deals to reach investors beyond their immediate network....

​[[{"value":" TL;DR: Nine in ten funded startups won't get a venture exit, yet many are solid businesses with real technology and proven teams. The buyer who fits them best, the mid-market company, needs exactly that capability and can't build it fast enough. What's missing isn't companies or capital. It's the connection. The last piece ended on a claim worth unpacking. If most funded startups never reach the exit everyone underwrites for them, they don't all simply vanish - they become a large pool of capable businesses looking for an outcome. And the buyer who could give them an outcome — and their investors a return — is hiding in plain sight. It isn't a fund, a tech giant, or a private-equity roll-up. It's the established, mid-sized company. Profitable, somewhere in the £20–50m revenue band, the kind of business that rarely appears in a venture conversation at all. It has a problem that looks nothing like the startup's, but the two fit together almost exactly. The build problem Mid-sized companies are...

​[[{"value":" TL;DR: Our 2024 bootstrapping advice still stands but for none of the original reasons. AI has made building nearly free, venture money has concentrated into a handful of AI deals, and investors now fund proof, not vision. Bootstrapping is no longer how you survive a bad market; it’s how you become fundable. Raise late, from strength, or not at all. You can read our earlier version here We stand by the conclusion. Bootstrapping is often the smarter path. But almost every reason we gave for it has changed: The cost of building a product has collapsed.  The funding market didn’t recover evenly. It concentrated. And bootstrapping stopped being the thing you do because you can’t raise, and became the thing you do because it puts you in a stronger position when you finally can. One thing does still hold, and it anchors everything below: bootstrapping forces discipline that outside money can mask. When the only cash coming in is cash your customers hand you, you learn your unit economics early, you...

​ Every pitch deck ends the same way. A slide titled "Exit," a logo soup of plausible acquirers, and a line about a five-to-seven year horizon to a "liquidity event." It is the part of the story everyone nods along to and no one checks. We checked. Dealum sits on the portfolio records of more than 180 angel networks with thousands of investments logged not by a research team writing a report, but by the people who actually wrote the cheques. It is a dataset that captures what happens after the round closes, including the part of the story that rarely makes it into a conference panel: the companies that raised once and then went no further. The picture it paints is not the one on the slide. But it is not all bad news. Most of these companies never found a buyer — yet many of them are solid, working businesses. The way out is to widen the exit: instead of waiting for an IPO or a big-corporate acquisition, these startups can sell to, or partner with established mid-market companies, buyers that need exactly...

​[[{"value":" Understanding the role of conflict and recognizing when it becomes harmful is only part of the equation. In practice, most teams struggle with how to handle it in real time – often under pressure, with limited resources, and across different levels of hierarchy. In previous articles of our three-part series, we talked about how conflict should not be feared and, when resolved correctly, is a source of positive innovation. But how to achieve this positive solution? This article provides concrete tools and structures for resolving conflict in a way that leads to better outcomes, both within teams and between founders and investors. Read the previous articles in the series: Don’t let a good conflict go to waste Founder mismatch: when conflict becomes a problem and how to solve it Switching to learning mode The resolution of most conflicts does not lie in will, but in approach – for example, people try to impose their own point of view or reach a compromise, although this rarely leads to the best...