The free angel investor database

Because every investor here is linked to the companies they funded, the database answers questions a list of names cannot. A few things stand out once you look at the whole set.

Most angels are not repeat angels. 11,562 of the 58,336 investors on file have exactly one recorded investment. The median investor is far less active than the visible ones, and a list that does not distinguish between them will send most of your emails to people who invested once, years ago, and never again.

The active tier is smaller than it looks. 11,571 investors have ten or more investments, and only 3,333 have fifty or more. Those roughly 3,300 people are the ones running an angel portfolio as an ongoing activity rather than a one-off, and they are where a cold approach has the best chance of landing.

The average is misleading. Mean portfolio size is 12.3 companies, but that number is dragged up by a long tail: the most active investor on file has 237 recorded investments, followed by 188, 163 and 144. Averages are not a useful filter here; sorting by activity is.

The practical consequence is that the useful query is rarely "angel investors in my city". It is closer to "investors with more than ten investments, in my sector, who have backed something adjacent to what I am building" — which is a few dozen people, not tens of thousands.

The failure mode with any investor database is treating it as a mailing list. A list of 58,000 names is not 58,000 prospects; for most companies the real target set is somewhere between twenty and eighty people, and the value of the database is in finding those and discarding the rest.

Start from portfolio overlap, not sector tags. An investor who has already backed two companies adjacent to yours understands the market and has a reason to reply. Sector labels are self-reported and generous; portfolios are a record of where money actually went.

Check stage before anything else. An angel who writes $25,000 cheques at pre-seed and one who leads $3m seed rounds are different businesses. Getting this wrong is the most common reason a good introduction goes nowhere.

Reference something specific. The first line of the email should name the portfolio company that made you write. That is the difference between a reply rate that justifies the work and one that does not.

Most databases lump them together, and the distinction matters more than the labelling suggests. An angel investor invests their own money, usually decides alone or with one or two others, and can commit in days. Cheque sizes commonly run from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand. A venture capital firm invests other people's money through a fund, answers to an investment committee and to its own limited partners, and takes weeks or months to reach a decision.

For a founder that difference decides sequencing. Angels can fill a round while a fund is still in diligence, and a lead angel with a strong reputation often makes the fund conversation easier rather than replacing it. It also changes how you write: an angel is persuaded by the founder and the idea, a fund partner is additionally persuaded by market size and how the deal will look to their own investors.

This database covers both, and marks which is which, because a target list of fifty names that mixes them without distinction will get two different emails wrong at once.

Every investor record is built from disclosed investment activity: funding announcements, company filings and public investor pages. The 454,650 links between an investor and a company are the backbone — a profile exists because there is a recorded investment behind it, not because someone described themselves as an angel on a social profile.

That approach has a deliberate consequence worth stating plainly: an investor who is genuinely active but keeps their deals quiet will be under-represented here, and so will very recent investments that have not been announced. No investor database is complete, and any that claims to be is counting things loosely. What this one guarantees is that what is recorded is traceable to something that actually happened.

Profiles are refreshed continuously rather than in periodic bulk updates, and each one shows the companies backed so you can judge how current a given investor's activity is instead of relying on a site-wide freshness claim.