Angel Capital Association (ACA)

The Angel Capital Association calls itself the world's largest community of angel investors, and the numbers support the claim: more than 15,000 member angel investors, and 200 angel groups, marketplace platforms and family offices, whose portfolios hold over 30,000 companies.

It is the umbrella body for organised angel investing in North America rather than an angel group itself, which is the distinction to hold onto when reading this entry.

Who joins

Two kinds of member. Individual accredited investors join in their own right. Organisations join as entities: angel groups, investment platforms and, notably, family offices.

That last category is why this appears in the directory. Family offices making direct early-stage investments face exactly the problems ACA exists to solve, namely finding deals outside their own network, running diligence properly, and syndicating alongside people who have done it before.

How membership works

Membership runs by application in either category. Established angel groups applying to join pay a US$350 application fee, which is published. Ongoing dues are not published for any category, so the actual annual cost has to come from ACA directly.

What members get

Education is the substantial part, delivered through what ACA calls Angel University alongside webinars and a library of model documents. Those model documents deserve emphasis: term sheets and investment agreements that reflect current market practice, available without paying a law firm to draft them from scratch. For a family office making its first few direct investments, that alone can repay the membership.

Beyond education sit a member directory, and peer groups organised specifically for syndication, which is how an investor in one city reaches deals sourced in another.

The ACA Summit is the annual gathering, moving between American cities.

The fourth strand is policy. ACA represents angel investors in Washington and at state level, arguing for rules that protect their ability to invest. This matters more than it sounds. The definition of an accredited investor, and the rules governing private placements, determine who is legally permitted to back early-stage companies at all. Those rules are periodically revisited, and organised angels are the constituency arguing their corner.

For a family office already investing directly, ACA is best understood as infrastructure rather than a peer group: the education, the documents and the syndication contacts, plus a voice in the rules that govern the whole activity.