Aligned didn’t begin as a strategy deck or a brand refresh. It started, honestly, with frustration.

I’ve been angel investing for nearly a decade. Before that, I spent two years at J.P. Morgan. I left banking to build two startups of my own. That experience, being on both sides of the table, shaped how I think about capital.

As an angel, I see too much noise. As a founder, I remembered how lonely and inefficient fundraising felt.

At the same time, Brad was running Sowing Capital, the angel syndicate he founded in 2016, alongside founding ThatRound, because he’d experienced much of the same. Over time, Sowing Capital and my own network, OVC Ventures, kept co-investing. We were independently arriving at the same conclusions about high-potential businesses.

In 2026, it felt obvious. Rather than continue running two overlapping networks, we combined forces into what is now Aligned Syndicate.

A more selective market demands conviction

If you zoom out, the UK market tells a clear story.

In 2025, there were 5,887 equity deals, with a combined £24b invested¹. Average deal size rose to £4.22m, the highest since 2021¹. Capital is concentrating into fewer companies. AI alone accounted for nearly a third of total UK deal value last year. Investors are making bigger bets, but on fewer teams.

From where I sit, this shift is healthy. It forces clarity.

At Aligned, we reject around 99% of what we see. Not because we enjoy saying no, but because venture outcomes are driven by outliers. If you’re targeting 25× returns over 7–10 years, you cannot afford to operate on volume.

Our model reflects that.

We share one or two opportunities per month with our angels. That’s it. No pitch nights with ten companies. No “maybe” deals. When a founder comes into our room, they have our full attention, which makes it easier for members to build conviction and get excited about what’s in front of them.

Incentives shape our behaviour

One of the quiet issues in angel syndicates is misaligned incentives.

Some groups charge annual fees. Some earn regardless of performance. Some optimise for activity because activity looks like momentum.

Brad and I take a different approach.

We personally invest in every deal. We only get paid when our investors exit profitably. Founders don’t pay anything upfront. We only charge a small success fee once capital is actually deployed.

That structure forces discipline. If a company doesn’t work, we feel it.

I think founders underestimate how much incentive design changes behaviour. When your upside depends entirely on long-term performance, you have to be selective. You also become deeply supportive.

Our angels aren’t just passive capital. They’re a mix of exited founders and operators, to seasoned employees across technology and finance. All want exposure to great startups. When they invest, they lean in and can have in the past made significant non-capital contributions through the access and guidance they can provide.

That’s the part I enjoy most. Watching capital turn into conversations, then into customers, partnerships and growth.

The role of ThatRound at Aligned

Being an early user of ThatRound changed how I thought about sourcing startups.

Angel investing has always been somewhat reactive. Introductions were warm but inconsistent. Deck quality varied wildly. You’d spend hours filtering before you could even start thinking.

ThatRound introduced structure, and I’ve grown more and more confident that the deals that get surfaced to me via their platform, will meet our criteria. It’s clear to me, that ThatRound is a team who understand the fundraising ecosystem, and the challenges on both sides of the market.

Today, Aligned benefits from proprietary visibility into dozens of early stage startups each month through ThatRound’s ecosystem. That doesn’t mean we invest more. It means we see opportunities earlier and filter better.

Our timeline from first meeting to allocation is typically four to six weeks. Recently, one founder raised £350k from our group in just one week. Although that’s not typical, it does show what we’re looking for: alignment - world class founders, huge upside and reasonable valuations.

In a market where 78% of founders say raising investment in the UK is difficult², process matters. Transparency matters. Signal matters.

What Aligned is really about

Aligned isn’t about being the biggest syndicate. It’s about being the most aligned.

Aligned between:

Us and our investors
Us and founders
Capital and conviction

The UK remains one of the strongest tech ecosystems in Europe. We’ve produced hundreds of unicorns and thousands of venture-backed companies. But scaling capital efficiently, especially at the earliest stages, still feels harder than it should.

I don’t believe the answer is more platforms, more pitch nights or more noise.

I believe it’s tighter rooms.

Clearer incentives.

Higher standards.

And real alignment.

References

The Deal 2026 | Beauhurst - https://www.beauhurst.com/research/the-deal-2026/
The Entrepreneurs Survey 2025 | The Entrepreneurs Network - https://www.tenentrepreneurs.org/entrepreneurs-survey

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