Accessing Entrepreneurial Finance in the Pandemic Webinar

Join us for this Finance Webinar – Accessing Entrepreneurial Finance in the Pandemic – led by Dr Keith Arundale.

This Webinar is free to attend and open to all but registration is so essential. Online registration is now closed. Please email the Alumni team if you wish to attend.

Against this uncertain background join us on 28 January 2021 to learn how entrepreneurs and management teams can go about raising venture capital and other forms of entrepreneurial finance in a very difficult environment. There is still plenty of VC out there; the problem is accessing it. Entrepreneurs need a proposition that is solving a big problem, evidence of traction in a growing market and a great management team. Crowdfunding, business angel finance - including from our own Henley Business Angels - and corporate VC should also be considered.

Venture capital (VC) firms have been cancelling deals in the coronavirus pandemic, or at least delaying them because of the uncertainty of whether there will be further lockdowns in the absence of a vaccine. VCs are revising the scenario analyses of portfolio companies, building in much longer holding periods to exit and downgrading valuations. Investment committees are taking much longer to sign off on even relatively small deals. A recent report by the Scale Up Institute and Innovate UK (“The Future of Growth Capital”) reveals that start-ups are facing a cash shortage of up to £15 billion after funding from investors has fallen away during the pandemic. According to the Plexal Start-Up Tracker there has been a continuing decrease in the value of start-up investing and in deal numbers for seed stage companies during the pandemic. It is likely that seed investing will suffer the most of all forms of entrepreneurial finance, making it difficult for start-up businesses to get off the ground.

Attend this webinar for:

• Details of the funding opportunities that are aimed at start-ups and high-growth enterprises, including venture capital, business angel finance, equity crowdfunding and corporate VC

• A practical perspective on investment requirements and Dr Keith Arundale's top three tips for pitching to VC firms
• An overview of the current landscape (including the impact of Covid-19) for entrepreneurial finance and the near-term prognosis

This Webinar is free to attend and open to all but registration is so essential. Online registration is now closed. Please email the Alumni team if you wish to attend.

Speaker Bio:

Dr Keith Arundale is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the ICMA Centre, Henley Business School where he teaches the undergraduate and postgraduate modules on Private Equity & Venture Capital. Formerly, Keith led business development and the venture capital programme for the Global Technology Industry Group in Europe at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). Keith was awarded an Adam Smith Business School prize for PhD excellence for his research work into VC fund performance and investment practices in Europe and USA. Keith is the author of “Raising Venture Capital Finance in Europe” (Kogan Page, 2007) and “Venture Capital Performance: A comparative study of investment practices in Europe and the USA” (Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 2020). He also authored the British Private Equity & Venture Capital Association’s (BVCA) “Guide to Private Equity”. He is currently carrying out research into the investment practices of VC firms in China in collaboration with Chinese colleagues from the University of Chester where he is a Visiting Professor.