A self-described maverick corporate venturing investor, Peter Cowley takes a unique approach to investing on behalf of Martlet, a corporate angel fund sponsored by Marshall, a UK-based engineering group.
The group is the dream of Robert Marshall, of Marshall’s founding family, who came to know Cowley through his personal angel investing. He said: “We [Martlet] usually invest £50,000 ($80,000) to £100,000 alongside angels, where we are commonly the biggest involved. One of our metrics is to match or better the internal rate of return [a measure of profit] within the group.”
As the group is largely designed simply to support UK start-ups it is less integrated with its parent corporate than other venture units.
Cowley said: “Our sectors are still mostly business-business defensible tech, although we, both Martlet and I, have invested in a couple of deals where the team is really great but the product or market sector is off our general focus – one is Syndicate Room, facilitating building an investment round with a business angel as the core investor, very different from the normal crowd investing model, and in our view much better protected from Financial Conduct Authority regulation than all others. Plus we invested in an accelerator programme specialising in the internet of things, in which Cambridge University and corporates have more experience than in any other UK cluster.”
Cowley is a long-term Cambridge resident, and was originally an engineering and computing science graduate of the university. He is a board member of Cambridge Angels, runs the Computing Laboratory Ring mentoring scheme and chairs the IdeaSpace supporter group.
He has angel investments in sectors including biotech, med-tech, aerospace, printing and instrumentation. He is a non-executive director or board observer with six companies.
Over the past 12 years, he has been treasurer and chairman of several charities in the advice, healthcare and education sectors. He also works in property development and construction. What is the future of angel investing?
Cowley said: “I am seeing more and more start-ups migrating from the former eastern European companies to base themselves in the UK, because the language of start-ups is English, because the UK has a good market, and is a springboard to the USA, because voluntary mentors are plentiful and because early-stage capital is readily available.”