Angel Investment Returns Review
AngelCentral is an active angel club that started off as an informal group back in 2017. In 2018, we incorporated as a company in order to do more for the Angel community in Singapore.
Our vision is to build a community of high-quality angel investors in Singapore and ASEAN, with angel members who don’t just do well as angel investors but also do the right thing for startups and founders. At the same time, we also recognize our ecosystem is relatively young and so focus a lot on peer-to-peer learning among angel investors in addition to providing lots of deal flow and administration services for the SPVs our angels create.
As of end 2025, we have 120 angel members and reviewed 1051 startups during the year. Cumulatively, our club members have funded about S$38m. We have also run over 100 workshops on topics like Angel Investing Masterclasses, Legal Masterclasses, Due Diligence Masterclasses and deep dives into various startup sectors. In total, we have trained over 1000 angel investors in the ASEAN region.
Angel Investments in 2025
2025 was a continuation of 2023 and 2024 in terms of subdued funding activity across all stages and sectors. Entrepreneurial activity remained strong with a record 1000+ startup submissions. At the same time, the AI wave continued with 21% of our startups categorizing themselves as AI centric. In terms of actual quantum funding that we track from our members, we are flat compared to 2024 at about $4M. Like 2024 and 2023, this is a low from the high of almost S$6M back in 2021.
Our club data reflects the broader climate and is corroborated by our AngelCentral Internal Data and also by external reports which also noted continued slowdown in funding.
In total for 2025, we helped our angels do the admin work for 3 more new syndicates. We also experienced a few failures for older syndicated startups. Since inception, our angels have created 40 syndicates of which 8 have failed or closed down.
And as an academic exercise, we have been calculating the angel investment returns for a hypothetical angel who decides to invest with the same sum in each and every syndicate. As a recap, from 2Q2018 to 4Q2025, we helped angel members do the admin and corp sec work for a total of 40 syndicates regionally. These startups included startups from Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand. This is testimony to our regional reach for dealflow.
AC Syndicate Qualitative Analysis
AngelCentral analyzed all 40 syndicated startups. Syndicated deals have deeper curation as it’s a group effort by multiple angels who want to invest in a startup. Frequently, there is also a lead angel supporting.
Some terms used :
- “Upround” is counted so long as there is new money raised at higher valuation; Can be any instrument but the raise must be of minimum USD$100K or more;
- “Ongoing” is counted if the startup has no fund raising activity since our round and is a going concern;
- “Downround” is counted if the startup raised money on a down round
- “Closed Down” is counted if the startup is inactive or on verge of closing down.
Some assumptions made :
- Same amount invested per syndicate
- Invest in all 40 syndicates since end 2Q 2018 to 4Q 2025
- Upround is based on new financing valuation
- Data source is actual funding rounds
Our angel investment returns
We are happy to report that if an angel participated in every syndicated deal, the performance is pretty good. Take a look at the tables below.
| Status | As at 4Q2025 | |
| Upround/Rev >3X | 16 | |
| Ongoing | 14 | |
| Downround | 2 | |
| Closed/Failed | 8 | |
| Some of our Up rounds Startups | Motorist, Nimbus, ParcelPerform, Ailytics, Blood, Neuron, Simtrum |
| Data as of end 4Q2025 | TVPI |
| AngelCentral Syndicates | 1.69 |
| Syndicates IRR | 16.92% |
| 2019 Vintage Global VC (median) IRR
2019 Vintage Global VC (median) TVPI |
12.56%
1.41 |
Nb: Global VC performance numbers are from Cambridge Associates.
Comparing against USA VCs of similar vintages, our syndicates as a whole have generated returns that are comparable or above the median. This is a good endorsement of the quality of our dealflow and angels who are basically picking startups better than the average VC in the USA.
Unfortunately, there is no data on ASEAN seed VCs that will allow us to compare against our direct VC peers.
In summary
AngelCentral provides angel members with sizable deal flow, quality learning and also experienced outsource admin work for your syndicates.. While we measure our impact by the 1000+ angels touched and the S$38M funded into startups, we also want to know if our angels are getting good returns.
We are happy to report that based on the returns analysis above, the data shows that our club’s curation is working and is of good quality at AngelCentral. We believe that as our community grows and we help each other find and evaluate startups better, the curation and so returns will only get better with time. So, if you are keen to learn more about angel investing and want to join a group of really passionate and sincere angel investors, do find out more about AngelCentral membership.
If you are interested in our yearly review, view our angel investment returns in 2021, angel investment returns in 2022, angel investment returns for 2023 and angel investment returns for 2024 for our syndicated deals.
