An angel investor is a private individual who puts their own money into a young company and takes a minority stake in it in return. Most bring experience and a contact book too, and often want a seat at your board. What they want back is a sale, because shares in a private company only turn into cash when somebody buys them. It's rarer than it looks. In 2024-25, 3,735 UK companies raised money under the Enterprise Investment Scheme and 2,430 under its seed version, against 5,516,377 companies on the register. So the first question isn't how to find an angel. It's whether yours is a company one could ever sell at a profit.

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What an angel investor is

One person, investing their own money, taking shares in return. That last part is the whole difference. A bank lends you money it needs back on a schedule. A venture capital fund invests other people's money in larger amounts and usually later, against a deadline it can't move. An angel spends their own.

'Private investor' is the wider term, and people use the two interchangeably when they search. Angels are the private investors who back companies early, before a bank or a fund usually will. Most have run a business themselves, which is why the useful part is often not the cheque but the person attached to it, who has already made the mistake you're about to make.

Some invest alone. Many invest through a group – a network or a syndicate – where several angels look at the same deal together and one experienced angel leads it. That changes the arithmetic in a way worth knowing early. In 2025, 27 UK angel groups put £53 million into 321 deals, and those rounds were worth £348 million in total. The groups supplied about a sixth of the money and brought in the rest. So a group is usually how a round starts, not how it finishes.

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What an angel takes, and what they expect back

A minority stake in your company, and it's permanent. You're not buying money with a repayment schedule. You're selling a share of everything the company earns from here on, and of whatever it's eventually worth.

That cuts both ways, and the generous side is real. There are no monthly repayments, so the cash stays in the business while it grows. If the company never takes off, the angel isn't repaid. They carry that loss with you, which no lender does.

The other side is the exit. Shares in a private company only turn into money when someone buys them, so an angel needs your company to be sold, floated, or bought out at some point. They aren't looking for a dividend from a steady business. They're looking for a sale, and from the day they invest that's the plan you've agreed to, whether or not anyone says it out loud.

Expect that to show up in the paperwork. Many angels want a seat at your board or a standing invitation to it, regular numbers, and a list of decisions the company can no longer take on its own: issuing more shares, borrowing above a limit, changing what the business does, or selling it. And once there are outside shareholders, your duties as a director run to the company and all of its members, not to you and not to the investor who backed you.

None of that is a reason not to raise. It's the reason to decide whether you want to run a company that has to be sold, before you spend three months pitching one.

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How much angels invest, and how few companies raise it

Most founders overestimate the cheque and underestimate the odds.

The honest numbers come from HMRC, because investors have to claim their tax relief, and those claims are the only reliable record of UK angel activity. Of the investors who claimed Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme relief in 2024-25, 56% put in £10,000 or less. At the other end, under the main Enterprise Investment Scheme, investments over £500,000 made up 20% of all the money claimed. So a syndicate of ten people writing small cheques is a far more typical round than one wealthy individual writing a large one.

Raising at all is rarer again. These are the companies that managed it:

Source: HMRC venture capital schemes statistics, published 21 May 2026. The 2024-25 figures are provisional.

Set that against the 5,516,377 companies on the UK register at the end of June 2026. A company can appear in both schemes, so the number of distinct businesses raising is lower still than the two rows above suggest.

And it concentrates. Under the main scheme, 4% of companies took 27% of the money. London and the South East took 60% of it, and 66% of the seed scheme's.

If you run a profitable agency, a care provider, a wholesaler, or a building firm, that isn't a test you've failed. You're in a different market from the one these schemes were built for. The same point answers the question founders ask most often here: no, angels don't only back technology. They back food and drink, healthcare, consumer brands, and manufacturing too. What decides it isn't your sector. It's whether your company could plausibly be worth several times as much to somebody else within a few years.

If it couldn't, that's much better to know in week one than in month four. Business grants don't dilute you at all, and our guide to sources of finance for businesses sets out what else is open to a company that would rather not sell shares.

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SEIS and EIS: the tax relief behind most UK angel deals

If you take one thing from this page into your first meeting, take this. For most UK angels, the tax relief isn't a bonus on the deal. It's most of the reason the deal works.

The two schemes – the Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme for the earliest stage and the Enterprise Investment Scheme after it – give an investor income tax relief for buying new shares in a qualifying company. That's 50% of the investment under the seed scheme, on up to £200,000 a year, and 30% under the main one, on up to £1 million a year. The relief is what makes a loss-making company worth the risk.

In the British Business Bank's 2025 survey of UK angel investors, 88% of those who invested in the 2023-24 tax year did so through one of the two schemes. The Bank doesn't say the rest would have refused without it, and nor will we. But a company that can't offer the relief is asking its investors to take the same risk for a worse return, and that's the practical reason most rounds are built around it.

So check whether your company qualifies before you pitch, not after. There are limits – £250,000 in total under the seed scheme, and for most companies up to £10 million in any 12 months and £24 million over a lifetime under the main one – plus conditions on your size, your age, your trade, and how you spend the money. Our guide to equity financing sets the two schemes out side by side, and the gov.uk guidance on the seed scheme and the main scheme has the full conditions.

You can also ask HMRC for advance assurance that your company looks likely to qualify. It isn't required and it isn't a guarantee, but it's what an angel will ask for, and it isn't a formality: HMRC received 4,085 seed-scheme applications in 2025-26 and had approved 76% of them by March 2026.

One date to keep in view. Enterprise Investment Scheme income tax relief is legislated to apply to shares issued before 6 April 2035.

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Where to find angel and private investors in the UK

There's no single list of UK angels, and anyone selling you one is mostly selling you a list. There are five routes instead, and they suit different companies.

Look regionally first. A London fund isn't where a Sheffield manufacturer's round comes from, and the association's directory is organised by region and sector for exactly that reason.

And some angels invest through equity crowdfunding platforms, alongside a crowd of much smaller investors. That suits a company with a product customers already talk about, because the campaign is public and so are your numbers.

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How to approach an angel, and who you're allowed to pitch to

Angels say no far more often than yes, and most of the nos are about fit rather than about your company. So put the effort into the shortlist, not into the deck.

1. Build a shortlist of 20 to 30 angels or networks that have actually backed your sector at your stage. Look at the last few deals they announced, not the stage range on their website.
2. Find a route in. A mutual contact who introduces you gets a reply. A cold email mostly doesn't.
3. Send five or six lines. What you do, who for, what traction you have, how much you're raising, and what it pays for.
4. Have a short deck ready for the ones who reply: the problem, your solution, the market, your traction, your team, and the ask. Our guide to writing a business plan covers the numbers behind it.
5. Follow up once, then move on. A slow reply isn't a no, but a chased one rarely becomes a yes.

What they're looking for, when you get in front of them, is fairly consistent: a clear and urgent problem someone will pay to solve, a product that can scale, early traction however small, a team that can deliver and will take advice, and a believable route to them getting their money back.

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Who you're allowed to pitch to

This is the part most pages leave out, and it carries real risk. Promoting shares in your own company is a regulated activity. Under section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000, a company can't invite people to invest in it in the course of business unless it's authorised, an authorised firm has approved what it sends, or an exemption applies.

The exemptions founders rely on cover investors who have certified themselves as high net worth or as self-certified sophisticated, and the certificate has to be signed before you approach them. Don't try to pin down the thresholds from a blog: they were raised in January 2024 and reduced again that March, and the Financial Conduct Authority has since asked government to change them again. Approval is a narrower route than it used to be, too. Since 7 February 2024, an authorised firm needs specific permission from the regulator before it can approve an unauthorised company's promotion.

In practice, networks and platforms check investor status for you, which is one of the better arguments for going through one. If you approach individuals yourself, take legal advice on which exemption applies and keep every investor's signed statement.

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How long raising takes, and what it costs

Months, not weeks. Allow for research and outreach before anyone commits, several meetings with each serious investor, a term sheet setting out the valuation and the investor's rights, due diligence on your accounts, contracts, and shareholdings, and then the legal documents – usually a shareholders' agreement and new articles of association.

You'll pay for the legal work, and some networks and platforms charge fees on top. We can't give you a figure for either. Every range in circulation traces back to someone's blog rather than to published data, and we'd rather say so than make one up. Ask two corporate lawyers for a quote, and ask any network what it charges before you apply.

The practical consequence is simple. If you need the money this quarter, equity isn't the tool for this particular need, however right it might be for the next one.

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Where an iwoca Flexi-Loan fits, and where it doesn't

We lend, we don't invest. If your company genuinely needs equity, with no revenue yet and no date you can put on repayment, we aren't an alternative to an angel and a loan is the wrong tool. The case worth separating out is the other one: a company already trading that reaches for permanent capital to solve a problem of timing. Stock before a season, a hire ahead of the revenue it brings in, a tax bill landing before customers pay. An iwoca Flexi-Loan is a business loan with flexible repayment options, and because there's no fee for repaying early you can clear it as soon as the cash arrives – many of our customers only take out our finance for a few weeks, or even days. Selling a permanent share of your company to cover a few weeks is an expensive way to do it. Mark Natthan was turned down by three high street banks when CQD Cleaning Services had no credit history; he has taken more than 80 fundings from us in the nine years since, £1.4m in total, and still owns all of it. We lend to UK limited companies, and every new Flexi-Loan needs a personal guarantee from at least one director.