From new KC digs, Angel Capital Group restructures membership

A national angel network recently relocated its headquarters from Nashville, Tenn., to Kansas City, Mo.. In addition to …

A national angel network recently relocated its headquarters from Nashville, Tenn., to Kansas City, Mo..

In addition to the move, Angel Capital Group – formerly based in Nashville, Tenn., —  also began offering a new member option for its investors and plans to open angel chapters in three new cities, including Omaha, in the coming months.

Josh Roberts, chief marketing officer of Angel Capital Group (ACG), said the move of the company’s headquarters to Kansas City in May was largely due to the fact that ACG chief executive Rachael Qualls (below) is originally from the Kansas City area. But Roberts said the growing startup community was a draw as well.

“We really felt like the entrepreneurial community there was thriving in a unique way,” he said, “and for what we do we wanted to be right in the middle of it.” 

Roberts said the company’s office in Nashville is still fully operational.

ACG is different from local angel networks because it invests in companies across the country, with angel chapters in Nashville, Kansas City, Knoxville, Tenn., and Jackson, Miss. Each chapter has about 10-20 members from the community.

ACG also recently restructured its membership options. Previously, all members paid a yearly fee of $5,000, which covered deal flow generation, deal screening, legal accounting, structuring work and post-funding management. Now, any member who pays the $5,000 fee has access to the same benefits as before, but the first 10 members of any Angel Capital Group chapter who commit at the $5,000 level will become part of a founders pool for that chapter. When any portfolio company exits, the founders pool receives a share of the profits.

“It’s a way of sharing our success and profits with those individuals that were the first to believe in our mission in any new market,” Roberts said.

AGC also introduced a membership option whereby members are charged five percent of the capital they invest (with a minimum $10,000 investment).

“We wanted to put the fees in proportion to their investment, so that they had as much incentive as possible to make an investment of any size,” Roberts said.

The new membership option also aims to open up the potential pool of investors.

“We think there’s a lot more potential angels out there who aren’t participating simply because some of the market dynamics don’t incite them to get into the game,” Robers said.

ACG will also be adding investors by opening new chapters in Omaha, Denver, Colo., and Buffalo, N.Y. in the next three to six months, he said. 

 

Credits: Photo of Qualls from linkedin.com.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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