In April I attended a pitch event for the Seattle Angel Conference which was held at the Comotion Labs at the University of Washington's Seattle Campus.

Each of the five startups had an opportunity to pitch and then this was followed by a very thorough question and answer session.

There were a significant range of companies to review. One company was totally focused on robotics operating systems and looking to disrupt the robotics industry. Another one was providing a biomedical solution which had the capacity to generate significant savings in the health industry. There were also companies which offered solutions to problems in the general medical, sporting and human resource industries.

Each of the presenters did a great job of outlining where they see their company playing a role for customers and also how they are planning to mitigate the known risks which may impede their success.

This was a great opportunity to discuss the opportunities with the company founders as well as share experiences with other angel investors and hear about some of their best and worst experiences to date.

The concept for the conference was to start with around thirty opportunities and over a number of weeks and pitch sessions to reduce the number to one successful company which the angels would then invest in. Behind the scenes there was a significant amount of due diligence which was being carried out and all of the investors would report back on regular timeframes to outline the positive and negative things about each of the opportunities.

This also allowed the founders a reasonable amount of time to get to know the angel investors so that each group could outline how the companies could best be moved forward.

Overall this was a great event and provided an interesting insight into how one angel group is operating in the North West of the United States of America.