Angel investing
Engjëll means angel.
I back B2B productized digital services, high-ticket B2B products, and services turned into software, built in Albania and Kosovo.
I am not a fund and there is no committee. Investment comes from me directly or through my ventures, division5 and divisionAI, and which of those it is depends on what the business actually needs. I have built one service business here since 2015 and I know exactly which parts of that were avoidable. Most of what I can offer is the shortcut through those parts.
What I invest in
B2B productized digital services
A service sold like a product. Fixed scope, fixed price, delivered the same way every time. The test is simple: if your second client costs you materially less to serve than your first, you are productized. If every project starts from a blank page, you are not, and that is the first thing worth fixing.
Services as software
Work that used to be sold by the hour, now delivered mostly by software with AI doing the labour and people kept on the judgement. The customer buys the outcome rather than a team, and your cost of serving the next one is close to nothing. This is the end of the same road as the first category: bespoke work becomes repeatable, and repeatable work becomes software. If you are partway along it, that is a good place to find me.
High-ticket B2B products
Something sold to other businesses at a price that justifies a real sales conversation rather than a checkout button. High ticket matters because it forgives a small market. You do not need a million users in a country of three million people; you need a few hundred customers who are genuinely better off.
Built here, sold abroad
The company and the team operate in Albania or Kosovo. The customers do not. They are in Europe or the US, and they are already paying. Not a plan to expand there, not a pilot, revenue.
This is the hardest filter on the page and the one I will not move on. A company selling only locally is capped by an economy of a few million people, and the work of landing the first customer in Berlin or Chicago is not something I can do on your behalf. Once you have proven you can, doing it repeatably is exactly what I am useful for.
Albania exports its best people. Everything I have built here is a bet that it does not have to, and this is the same bet with a different instrument.
What I look for
- Revenue that already exists, however small. It proves somebody is willing to pay, which is the only evidence that counts
- Delivery that repeats. The same thing sold twice beats a bespoke project sold once, every time
- A founder who can name what the business is stuck on without rehearsing it first
- Customers already abroad, in Europe or the US. Not a plan to sell there. Paying customers there now. The first foreign customer is a completely different problem to the tenth, and I want you past the first
What I bring besides money
I founded division5 in 2015 and spent the decade since turning a service business into something that runs on process rather than on me remembering things. That decade is the asset, and it comes with the cheque.
Customers and the network around them
Introductions to the companies we already work with through division5 and divisionAI, and to the people around them. Warm, and to someone who can actually decide, which is the only kind of introduction worth making.
Distribution
The hard part of a productized service is almost never building it. It is getting in front of buyers repeatably, without the founder personally closing every deal. That is the problem I have spent the longest on and the one most companies here are actually stuck on.
Streamlining how you deliver
Turning work that is reinvented per client into something that runs the same way every time. It is what makes a service business worth owning rather than worth working at, and it is a prerequisite for everything below it.
Automating what is left
Once delivery is consistent it can be automated, and that is what divisionAI does: software underneath the operation, with AI inside it rather than bolted on the side. In that order, because automating a process nobody has straightened out first just makes the mess run faster.
If you want to see how I think before you apply, the playbook is free and it is the same material.
Who should not apply
Being told no quickly is worth more than being strung along politely.
- Consumer apps. I would be guessing, and you deserve better than my guess
- Agencies billing purely by the hour with nothing productized. That is a job, not a business you can sell
- Companies selling only to Albanian or Kosovar customers. Good businesses, wrong investor. The ceiling is the local economy and I cannot lift it for you
- Ideas with no paying customers yet. Come back when someone abroad has paid, or when someone has said no for a reason you understand
- Anyone who wants a passive cheque. If money alone were enough, you would not need me specifically
If one of those is you, the work itself is still worth doing. The Constraint Sprint is the same four sessions I would run with a company I had invested in, without the investment, and it is open to anyone anywhere.
Apply
Nine questions, most of them one line. I read these myself. If it is a fit you will hear from me within a week, and if it is not I will tell you rather than leave you wondering.