ACF Investors Research
Investment Thesis
ACF Investors (formerly the Angel CoFund) is a UK venture capital co-investment platform founded in 2011 by Tim Mills, formerly Investment Director at the British Business Bank. The firm manages a £100M+ programme (all figures in GBP) across two co-investment vehicles, the Angel CoFund and the Delta Fund, that partner with experienced syndicates of sector-focused angel investors to fund and scale early-stage UK businesses. Rather than sourcing and pricing deals independently, ACF aligns its capital with angels who are already committing meaningful personal capital and sector expertise to a round, shares due diligence with that syndicate, agrees investment terms alongside them, and provides ongoing post-investment support. The firm explicitly seeks capital growth rather than income-generating investments and typically invests via the same or an aligned share class as the other round participants, avoiding special terms.
Sector Focus
ACF is explicitly generalist ("most sectors") but its live portfolio clusters into six categories it uses on its own site: CleanTech, Consumer and Creative, DeepTech, FinTech, Medtech, and Software/Digital Transformation. Representative sub-themes include: fintech infrastructure and payments (Ebury, Form3, BMLL, Bancone, NorthRow, OTCX), medtech and diagnostics (Creo Medical, Neurovalens, Cipher Surgical, Sky Medical, Oxford Medical Simulation, Cumulus Neuroscience), climate/cleantech (Tevva, Limejump, Enval, Smile Plastics, Sonichem), deep tech/hardware (Blu Wireless, Wayland Additive, Keit), consumer and creative (Gousto, Vitl, Hopster, Reboxed), and B2B software (BaseKit, Huq Industries, Techspert.io, HR DataHub, Sonicjobs, Venuescanner).
Stage Focus
ACF invests at the early stage, typically alongside a priced seed or Series A round led by an angel syndicate. Minimum total round sizes are £200K (Angel CoFund) and £500K (Delta Fund).
Check Size
- Angel CoFund: £100K-£1M per round, targeting roughly 30% of the round (up to a 49% cap in some cases)
- Delta Fund: £200K-£1M per round, capped at 30% of the round
- Lead angel minimum commitment: £40K (Angel CoFund) or £70K with deep sector expertise (Delta Fund)
Lead Tendency
Mixed. ACF is structurally a co-investor that matches capital to an angel-led round, so the lead investor of record is typically an angel or syndicate rather than ACF itself. In practice, however, press coverage sometimes credits ACF as having "led" a round (e.g., Hammer Missions, OneID) when its co-investment ticket was the largest institutional check. Classified here as "both."
Recent Activity
ACF has been actively deploying through 2025:
- April 2025: Co-invested £1.4M seed round in Hammer Missions (AI drone building-inspection software), alongside angel investors including Graham Hunter (GeoSLAM) and Martin Grant (Atkins), to fund North American expansion.
- February 2025: Led/co-invested in a £16M round (ACF's own ticket reported around £1M) in OneID, a UK bank-verified digital identity provider used by NatWest and Adobe.
- July 2025: Participated (£300K) in a £3.25M round in Cumulus Neuroscience (at-home EEG tech for neuroscience clinical trials), led by WhiteRock Capital Partners.
- September 2025: Participated in a £4.8M round in NoBACZ Healthcare, a Cambridge spinout building patented "liquid bandage" wound-care technology for livestock and horses, led by The Yield Lab.
- October 2025: Portfolio company BMLL Technologies (capital markets historical order-book data and analytics) was acquired by Nordic Capital for approximately $250M, marking one of ACF's largest recent exits.
Fund status: actively deploying, with multiple new investments and one notable exit in the second half of 2025.
Portfolio Highlights
ACF's portfolio spans 90+ companies with 16 recorded exits. Notable names and outcomes:
- BMLL Technologies - acquired by Nordic Capital (Oct 2025, ~$250M)
- Cavalry - acquired by Canva
- FATMAP - acquired by Strava
- Ebury - international payments and FX, raised at a £550M+ valuation
- Form3 - cloud-native payments infrastructure, raised a $220M Series C
- Gousto - recipe-box delivery, ranked on the FT Growth Champions list
- Limejump - energy flexibility platform, exited
- Neurovalens - neurostimulation wearables with FDA approvals
- Non Linear Dynamics, LivingLens, Sophia, IMSPEX Diagnostics, Vantage Power, Syrinix, City Pantry - additional exits
Team
- Tim Mills, Managing Partner - Founded ACF in 2011; previously Investment Director at the British Business Bank
- Sam Fennell, Partner
- Paul Fauset, Partner
- George Whitehead, Partner
- Sina Ataherian, Investment Director
- Liam Bradley, Associate
- Matt Boreman, Associate
Decision Process
ACF operates as a partnership rather than a solo-GP or formal investment-committee shop. Because its model requires an already-committed angel syndicate as a precondition, its own internal process is layered on top of syndicate due diligence: it reviews the syndicate's due diligence, negotiates aligned terms, and makes a partnership-level go/no-go decision. Typical time from initial meeting to completed investment is around three months, with the Delta Fund sometimes moving faster given the stronger commercial validation required of its leads.
Founder Preferences
ACF looks for UK-based, early-stage founders who have already assembled a credible syndicate of sector-smart angel backers willing to commit meaningful personal capital (minimum £40K-£70K from the lead). It favours founders across a broad range of sectors rather than a single vertical thesis, with a bias toward businesses seeking capital growth rather than income, and a preference for standard, non-preferential share terms shared with other round participants.
Geographic Focus
United Kingdom only. ACF is headquartered in Sheffield (Cooper Buildings, Arundel Street) with a second office in London (Farringdon), and its capital comes in part via a relationship with the British Business Bank.