SeedLegals Deals: Invest in the best UK startups

For investors, SeedLegals Deals gives you access to the best startups raising investment now. For founders, SeedLegals Deals brings investors to you. And everything completed seamlessly and efficiently on SeedLegals.

With around one in three of all early-stage investments now done on SeedLegals, it’s the UK’s favourite way for founders to complete all the legals for raising investment.

A quarter of active UK angel investors have done investments in companies on SeedLegals, have their shares and SEIS/EIS certificates on SeedLegals, and are familiar with our deal documents.

So, after years of founders asking if we could find investors for them, and investors looking for a single place to find great investment-ready startups with all their documentation in place, we’re taking UK fundraising to the next level with SeedLegals Deals.

SeedLegals Deals soft-launches in late April – hit the chat bubble to contact us for early access

As an investor, you’ll have access to a carefully vetted set of the best angel- and seed- stage UK startups, SEIS/EIS approvals in place, with pitch page, pitch video and deal summary, ready to proceed.

For founders, when you do your round on SeedLegals you’ll now be able to click to list your fundraise in Deals, and have SeedLegals find investors for you.

Introducing SeedLegals Deals

For investors, SeedLegals Deals is included in your SeedLegals for Investors membership.

For £499/year + VAT, SeedLegals for Investors…

• gives you access to Deals, the best UK startup investment opportunities
• lets you get together with friends and invest together as a syndicate (on SeedLegals, syndicates are free for investors, the company you’re investing in pays the syndicate fees)
• lets you create Investment Proposals to send to companies that you’d like to invest in
• gives you access to exclusive investor events and meetups
• lets you manage your portfolio, see the value of your investments
• includes a free UKBAA membership (normally £195/year)
• gives you access to SeedLegals expert help and advice

When we introduce investors to companies we charge a 2% brokerage fee, payable by the startup on all investments introduced by SeedLegals. That’s dramatically less than the 6% to 10% fees you’d typically pay when using an advisor to find investors. We only charge on investments that we find for you, if you want us to find investors for you (there’s no charge for investments you find yourself, of course).

Here’s it works

As an investor:

• Sign up or log into SeedLegals
• At the top right, click the Founders / Investors selector to switch to SeedLegals for Investors view.
• Click Deals
• If you’re not already a SeedLegals for Investors member, you’ll be prompted to join as a member.
• You’ll also need to click to confirm you’re a High Net Worth or Sophisticated investor, per the FCA requirements.
• You’ll now have access to the latest investment opportunities on SeedLegals
• When you click through to view a company, you’ll be viewing their SeedLegals Pitch page, which is a great way to see all the company essentials (team, amount raised, key deal terms, pitch deck and video) all in one place.
• If you’d like to learn more about that investment, click Register Interest and the founders will get right back to you to follow up directly.

For founders:

• You can, of course, continue to find investors yourself and just use SeedLegals for the SEIS/EIS, cap table and legals for your round.
• But, if you’d like us to help find investors for you by listing your investment in Deals, in your Pitch page and the Add Investors section in your funding round you’ll find a new Find investors for me
• Go ahead and click that.
• You’ll be prompted to complete a short set of FCA-required questions to satisfy us that you know what you’re doing (which hopefully you will, because you’ll be on SeedLegals and up to speed on all the funding round resources and deal terms).
• You’ll also sign an Introducer Agreement agreeing that we’ll charge 2% of any investment amounts that we find for you, payable as a success fee when the investment closes. If we don’t find investors for you there’s no charge, and of course there’s no charge for the investors you find yourself.
• Go ahead and create your Pitch page, specify the amount you want to raise, add your pitch deck, add a 1-to-3-minute video (videos really transform everything in creating an exciting investment proposition).
• Investors love SEIS/EIS, so if you don’t already have your Advance Assurance now’s the time to do that, on SeedLegals of course.
• When your pitch page is ready, we really suggest you share it as widely as you can on social media, to your friends. The more you share it, the more incomings you’ll have. These will all be completely free, because it’s you finding investors directly.
• When you’re ready for SeedLegals to help find investors for you, click the List my investment
• That will notify our compliance team who will carefully review your pitch, check that all claims you’re making are justified.

When we launch Deals we’ll be starting out with a small number of companies that have products already launched and/or who are already at revenue-making stage… so if you’re pre-launch please hold fire, it’s nothing personal, we need to balance supply and demand by starting out with a smaller number of later-stage companies before we widen the criteria.

FAQS

Questions founders might be asking

Q: Can I still find investors myself?

A: Yes, you can of course still find investors yourself. In fact we really encourage you to find investors directly because your lowest ‘cost of capital’ will always be angel investors (no legal fees, no preference shares, generally no board rights or management fees) that you find yourself. But we know that finding investors is hard, so if you need some help, that’s where SeedLegals Deals comes in, and for a 2% brokerage fee on investors who we introduce, we’ll list your company in Deals and help find investors for you.

Q: If I use SeedLegals to find investors, does my funding round have to be on SeedLegals?

A: We went to a lot of effort to create a streamlined end-to-end workflow that allows investors to express interest in investing in your company, let’s you track and manage investor interest, then negotiate and complete all the funding round deal terms and legals in one elegant process. So, yes, our intention is that the funding round is done on SeedLegals. It’s simply the best and fastest way to do a funding round.

But we know that just sometimes a VC will insist on using their own legals or their law firm to handle everything. It’s insane, we know… but our priority is to help you raise investment, not get in the way, so if that happens, sure, there’s no need to do your round on SeedLegals, you can just use us for the investor intros, cap table, SEIS/EIS, share certificates, option scheme, R&D tax back, employment agreements…

Q: Who keeps track of which investors SeedLegals introduced vs. I found myself?

A: When investors click through to view your Pitch page, you’ll find a new Referrer tab which shows which came through Deals vs. which came directly from you sharing your pitch page on social media, etc. We’ll only charge a brokerage fee on investors introduced by us, any that you bring to your pitch page yourself are yours, no charge. For investors you find yourself you don’t have to bring them through your Pitch page, you can pitch them by email, WhatsApp, whatever.

Q: What if I’ve already been talking to an investor and they’re then introduced by SeedLegals?

A: This is a common problem when using someone to find investors for you, you don’t want to pay them for introduce people you already know. The solution is known as a whitelist, where you list the names of investors you’re already talking to, or plan to talk to, and then the advisor knows they won’t be paid for those introductions. On SeedLegals, you can create your own whitelist easily – just go to the Investor Interest tab on your Pitch page, and add in the name and email of any investors that you’d like to whitelist. You’ll then be shown as the Referrer for those, even if they click through to your pitch from Deals later.

Q: What if you find me lots of small-ticket investors?

A: Our goal isn’t to compete with crowdfunding platforms. Deals is designed to bring you a dozen investors looking to invest £10,000+ each rather than hundreds of investors looking to invest £100 each. If it turns out you end up with a lot of small-ticket investors that’s no problem – in a few clicks you can create a Rollup as part of your funding round on SeedLegals and put smaller (say, under £5000) investors in a rollup, so you have a clean cap table even with lots of investors.

Q: Can I use Deals and still raise with SeedFASTs?

A: Yes you can. We know that SeedFASTs are hugely popular for fundraising – in fact more than 70% of investment on SeedLegals is now raised before a round with SeedFASTs or topping up after a round with Instant Investment rather than in a round. So when you set up your Pitch page, you can indicate whether you’re raising with SeedFASTs, doing a funding round, or topping up an existing round.

Q: Is there a Data Room for sharing due diligence documents?

A: Sure, the Pitch page and funding round features on SeedLegals both include a Data Room, so in addition to the pitch deck and video that you’ll be sharing publicly in your Deals listing, you can securely share additional information with selected investors, via your SeedLegals Data Room.

Q: Do I need to have a UK company to use Deals?

A: Yes, for now we can only find investments for UK companies. The investors can be anywhere in the world, but the company raising investment has to be UK registered.