Funding Column
Angel Groups On the Rise
By Brock Blake
The last few years have seen a complete overhaul in the local angel investment community.
Until recently, Utah only had one organized angel investment group and a handful of savvy individual angel investors.
Luckily all that has changed. Thanks to a concerted effort by Grow Utah Ventures and others, Utah now sports 11 organized angel groups and a large number of sophisticated active individual angels. The following is a table of current angel organizations:
| Angel Group | Investment Focus |
| Promontory Angels (Weber/Davis Area) | Technology, low to medium. Exception: anything extremely high tech, innovative, and perhaps world changing |
| Salt Lake Life Science Angels | Seed-stage life science including: medical device and product, pharma, biotech, and service. |
| Park City Angels | Open to investments in any traditional technology or lifestyle opportunity. |
| Olympus Angels (Salt Lake County) | Product or service with at least phase 1 development suitable for immediate revenue generation. |
| Utah Angels (Utah County) | Early to mid-stage ventures. Focused primarily on technology. |
| Southern Utah Angels (St. George area) | Open to any investment opportunity, but focused primarily on technology. |
| ThinkAtomic (Utah County) | Early-stage technology and intellectual property incubator. Funding provided as needed during growth stages. |
| Grow Utah Ventures | Technology or light manufacturing companies located along the Wasatch Front |
| Xbar Ventures | Open to any investment opportunity, but focused primarily on technology. |
| Early Run | Technology including: advanced wireless communications, peripheral equipment for satellite dishes, novel fishing paraphernalia, and Widget development platforms. |
| Cache Valley Venture Accelerator Club (currently dormant) | Technology Commercialization |
Brock Blake is the CEO of FundingUniverse, an organization that helps prepare qualified entrepreneurs to meet and present to active angel investors, lenders and VCs. For more information on getting in front of the Utah angel community, visit www.FundingUniverse.com.
Launch - Spring 2008
For text versions of all Spring 2008 articles, visit: www.launchutah.com/q12008-article-list.php
For the full "digital magazine" version of Spring 2008, visit: www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/growutah/launch_2008spring/
