High wire act - how one music start-up struck the right note with VC investors

Inside the race to fund GigPig

It’s brutal out there

This week we’ve been talking to businesses that have raised venture capital money, seemingly against the odds. 

A report we cited last week from KPMG Acceleris painted a slightly nervous picture.

In 2023, there were a total of 114 VC investments in the North West worth more than £462m ($575.6m) combined.

Nationally, VC investment into UK businesses continued to slide in the opening quarter for 2024, falling to levels last seen in 2018.

But the root of this could be that the VC’s themselves are feeling the pinch.

Either way, this one is a great tale of resilience and fortitude, with more to come.

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Mick Forster gets the whole vibe of music, entertainment and artists. His Dad was an agent.

He followed that same path. He managed one of the best known comedians of the last twenty years, but because I’m a pussy cat, and he asked me not to say who it is, I won’t.

Pictured above right, with investor Chris Tottman (left) and business partner Kit Muir-Rogers (centre), his most recent venture, headquartered in Manchester and away from his native North East, is GigPig, which looks to apply a bit of smart tech to the process of venues booking artists, bands, and DJs.

It describes itself as an online live music marketplace which on one hand provides venues with a streamlined way to search, book and manage entertainment in-house, while also offering artists a free platform to find, play and get paid for gigs. 

They were looking for a round of funding to propel the business to its next stage, a ‘runway’ of cash to pay for the next phase of the app development and more marketing to sign up venues.

But as anyone who will read Rainmakers probably knows by now, these processes are far from smooth. The tale has a happy ending and the story we ran a couple of weeks ago was that GigPig had “turned up the volume” with a £1.3m investment.

In the more established world of the mid-market that we’ve written about recently, that seems like pocket change. But in the start-up space, it’s proper make or break money.

But these processes can go to the wire. This one did.

Sometimes a business gets turned down for investment because the funder doesn’t get the proposition, and doesn’t think it’s a good enough idea with commercial legs.

But what this experience has also told us is that the other market dynamic playing out is that the venture funders are finding it hard to raise the cash. If it’s hard for seasoned private equity investors to get sign off from limited partnerships and family offices, then imagine what it’s like for the riskier end of the investment ecosystem.

Gary Tipper, the straight talking founder of Palatine private equity, told our Rainmakers conference in March it was the toughest fundraising market he’d ever known. 

While decent businesses should always get the money they need, what I’ve detected is a ripple effect through to the cheque writing itself.