Day: 22 May 2026

Thirty years of UK angel research describes the same problem.

Monochrome blue cartoon illustration of a reading-room table. A tall stack of academic papers and bound journals sits in the centre, with dates visible on the spines spanning several decades. To the right, a cartoon angel investor in a business blazer looks past the stack toward his computer, an open paper unread in front of him. An empty chair sits pulled out on the left. A faint city skyline and two framed certificates fill the background.

Most of the industry is still working around it. There’s a paper Colin Mason and his collaborators published in 2017 that does something quietly devastating. They asked 238 UK angel investors why they’d declined deals. Seventy-one per cent of the rejections came down to one or two reasons. Across the two surveys, between fifty-nine and […]