YBAN is the vision of a regional Business Angels Network in the county of Västernorrland. The project will also determine the volume of Business Angels capital in the region and sell the concept of Business Angels.
Business Angel funding is gaining nation-wide attention in Sweden, partly due to the recognition of the lack of seed capital in the financial system. There is an estimated 3000 active business angels in Sweden.
However, the information about the importance of Business Angel activities or even such basic information as how much capital is available to seed and expanding companies from Business Angels is poor.
The hypothesis of the project is that regional Business Angels contribute more than formal investment companies to the supply of venture capital in the region.
Identify the active business angels in the region. Determine the volume of capital available and invested. Map investment preferences. Build database.
Inform business community and advisers of the importance of Business Angels and how they operate. Supply key institutions with access to database.
Initiate a regional Business Angel Network (YBAN) as an Investors club and help them find suitable areas of activity.
YBAN will be created with a bottom-up approach, identifying Business Angels and helping them to form a co-operation. Our vision is a regional "Investors club" where Business Angels find common interests.
Many of the Business Angels in the region have already invested a large portion of their capital and they are not actively looking for new cases. Therefore, the main focus of YBAN is not matchmaking but more general co-operation like juridical, social and political.
A national body for regional BANs, SwedBAN, is building a national infrastructure for the informal venture capital market, and YBAN will apply for membership there.
Joakim Byström
Project Manager
PDF brochure in English www.yban.net/dokument/YBAN_english.pdf