Investors and Entrepreneurs Crowd the 2016 Angel Capital Summit
Rockies Venture Club hosted the 9th annual Angel Capital Summit with
23 pitching companies and a crowd of 300 community members.
Denver, CO - March 28th, 2016 Rockies Venture Club (RVC) the oldest angel investing club in the country hosted its 9th Annual Angel Capital Summit earlier this March. The conference featured 23 pitching companies, two keynote speeches, 3 expert-filled panels and a group of over 300 investors, entrepreneurs, and community members. This year the summit focused around the concept of syndication, the method through which nearly all angel deals happen.
Peter Adams, Executive Director of Rockies Venture Club stated, “RVC was excited to host this conference because of the doors that higher quality syndication opens for startup companies. When angel groups from across the country collaborate in a streamlined manner better deals can get funded faster and the companies can focus on growing.” For this to happen, angel groups need to be able to share deals freely. This was exemplified at the conference through the attendance of four separate angel groups including: Tech Coast Angels, New Mexico Angels, Sierra Angels, and Desert Angels who brought companies that pitched alongside the other 19 companies at the conference.
The Summit featured a keynote speech from Seth Levine of Foundry Group, a highly regarded venture capital firm based out of Boulder, CO. During his speech Seth talked his experience with FG Angels, one of the first angel syndicates on the AngelList platform, and the need for a strong angel community remarking, “Roughly a third of the deals in Colorado by deal count, touch an angel investor in any given year. It is so soundations to a robust entrepreneurial ecosystems to have a strong angel investment level. These days it is table stakes to a burgeoning entrepreneurial ecosystem such as Colorado and we have to do better if we want to keep this growth up.” To help sustain this grown Seth pointed out the lack of diversity in the angel and venture capital communities asking the community to, "give credit and listen harder to those people that have a particular market insight based on their background and experiences."
The Angel Capital Summit closed with the announcement of the venture bucks awards. These awards were determined by the audience voting where each member was given $100k in venture bucks to “invest” in their favorite companies that pitched at the summit. The winners of this competition (in order) were:
Unboundly (www.unboundly.com) is a radically optimized flight search for the 240 million millennials traveling internationally each year. Our search saves 20-90% on flights and includes 2x more carriers (especially low cost carriers in emerging destinations) to enable travelers to experience more for less.
mTusker (www.mtusker.com) is a Comprehensive SaaS ERP Platform for B2B Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and "Telco Channel" Agencies.
CereScan (www.cerescan.com) provides the most advanced, comprehensive brain diagnostic data available anywhere in order to significantly inform diagnoses, improve patient outcomes, advance neuroscience, and reduce healthcare costs. Their neuroanalytics give medical providers critical data that changes the way they treat patients with brain disorders.
About the Rockies Venture Club: Rockies Venture Club is the oldest and one of the largest Angel Group in the U.S.A., founded in 1985, whose mission is to advance economic development by actively connecting the most promising entrepreneurial companies with angel investors, venture capitalists, and other service providers. Rockies Venture Club offers over 150 educational programs, mastermind groups, angel forums, and two major conferences for both investors and entrepreneurs each year.