Fifth Avenue Advisors

A new “angel” fund has wings.

The Tamiami Angel Fund I, LLC is ready to fly after securing $1.5 million from private investors to help companies grow in Florida.

“Over the last 14 to 16 months, we’ve been out raising money for that fund,” said Timothy Cartwright, chairman of the Tamiami Angel Fund in Naples.

The fund is a first for Southwest Florida. There are similar ones located elsewhere in Florida, including Jacksonville.

“Our preference would be to look at Southwest Florida companies, but we have opened it up to the state of Florida,” Cartwright said.

“We feel it’s important to look at a broad-based deal flow in order to pick the best opportunities to invest in,” he said. “It is still an investment fund. So the goal is to make a return on investment.”

There are 30 investors in the fund, who each put in $50,000. Companies will make presentations to an executive committee overseeing the fund, which will then send the most promising opportunities on to investors.

By a super majority vote, investors will chose the companies they want to put their money into. Investors include retired entrepreneurs, former executives of Fortune 500 companies and even a retired professor, who all live in Southwest Florida, from Naples to Sarasota.

“We would expect to invest probably between $100,000 to $200,000 from the fund in any one company, which could mean we would have a portfolio of between eight to 12 companies that we invest in,” Cartwright said.

The goal is to help start-up companies grow and more established companies expand.

The fund changes the “entrepreneurial landscape” in Southwest Florida, giving entrepreneurs a new source of money to tap into during the earliest stages of starting a business, when other financing is hard to find, Cartwright said.

While there are other venture capital groups in Florida, most do not invest in early stage companies

“The EDC has declared our next phase of economic development in Collier County as the era of the entrepreneur and the Tamiami Angel Fund is a great addition to the resources available to our growing list of innovative entrepreneurs in Collier County,” said Tammie Nemecek, president and CEO of the Economic Development Council of Collier County.

The EDC’s mission is to diversify the local economy and create high-wage jobs.

The angel fund is an outgrowth of the Gulf Coast Venture Forum, which was created in 2001 to help foster business growth in Southwest Florida. Through the forum, individual members can decide whether to invest in companies after hearing formal presentations made at its regular meetings. These investors do not invest as a group.

The venture forum – along with economic development offices in Lee, Charlotte, Collier, Sarasota, Hendry and Glades counties, local universities and the Regional Business Alliance of Southwest Florida – investigated the feasibility of starting a local angel fund in 2008. After the study, a consensus was reached to do it.

Fund participants get one term sheet, simplifying what otherwise might be a contentious wrangling over the terms of their investment. They will get seats on the boards of the companies they invest in, allowing them to lend their own business expertise to those enterprises.

“Angel investors typically aren’t interested in getting involved in the day-to-day operations,” Cartwright said. “They do want a say in it. But more on a board level.”

The fund will begin reviewing investment opportunities immediately and will hold its first member meeting in October. It expects to get some of his leads from the Gulf Coast Venture Forum, which gets business plans from all over the country, but primarily from Florida.

“Right now we are getting about 30 business plans a month,” said Cartwright, who is the forum’s president.

Most of the investors in the new angel fund are different than those involved in the forum.

“This brought in a whole new class of investors,” Cartwright said.