Birch, Hoberman and the Digital British Equity Gap

Very interesting story from the Sunday Times, (seen initially on TechCrunch UK) about the setup of European Founders Capital (EFC):

EFC is being led by Michael Birch, co-founder of Bebo, and Brent Hoberman, who set up the dotcom bubble era Lastminute.com but is better known more recently for being a serial angel investor and co-founder of MyDeco.

They are joined by Rogan Angelini-Hurll, an old friend friend of Hoberman’s and former City research analyst at Salomons. Peter Dubens, who built the Pipex ISP business, is also backing the venture. Dubens sold Pipex’s broadband business to Tiscali for £210m in 2007.

EFC will have an initial £20m of seed funding but is aiming for £50m in total. The idea is to increase the availability of early-stage funding in Europe, which historically lags behind the US, and has led to a gap between early stage and Series A funding. Europe’s seed funding eco-system has never matched Silicon Valley’s in part because the business angel environment for technology is undeveloped and because European VCs have historically not reached much lower than Series A rounds, unless in syndication with other parties.

Nice move, as its aimed squarely at the "Equity Gap" between "friends & fools" and VC funding, which is a real issue in the UK (as we have pointed out repeatedly).

There is also a bigger discussion that this news needs to be seen as part of, ie the restructuring of the global Venture Capital market (see this recent article by Sarah Lacy as an example of the issue) but thats a whole 'nother post.

Anyway, I hope the boyz will do well by doing good