How it works.

Section 21 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 restricts who may be sent an invitation to invest. You complete the statutory investor statement confirming you are a high net worth individual or a sophisticated investor.

It takes about two minutes and lasts twelve months. We keep the completed statement as evidence that the exemption was properly relied upon.

Once you qualify, you see the same documents we saw. Not a summary of them.

• Information memorandum and the terms of the shares being issued.
• The HMRC Advance Assurance letter itself.
• Statutory accounts, management accounts and a five-year model with its assumptions stated.
• Capitalisation table and the dilution you should expect from later rounds.
• Articles of association and the shareholders' agreement you would be joining.
• Risk factors, written plainly, on the deal page.

We do not give investment advice and nothing on this site is a personal recommendation. We expect you to put the documents in front of your own accountant, solicitor or financial adviser before you commit anything.

If you would like us to speak to your adviser directly, we are happy to.

The company issues your SEIS3 or EIS3 certificate once it has been trading for four months. You then claim through self assessment, carrying an EIS subscription back to the previous tax year if that helps.

You must hold the shares for at least three years for the relief to be secure.

• Companies that cannot produce the documents listed above.
• Raises with no Advance Assurance and no credible path to it.
• Projections without stated assumptions.
• Valuations that cannot be explained by reference to comparable transactions.
• Anything where the exit route is asserted rather than argued.

• Recommend an investment to you, or tell you how much to invest.
• Offer any incentive to invest. The FCA prohibits inducements of this kind.
• Suggest that tax relief makes an investment low risk. It does not.
• Contact you about opportunities unless you have asked us to.