History Made As 15 European Investors Agree On A Standard Term Sheet For Startups

Reviewing term sheets from investors can be time consuming and not a little confusing, especially for first time entrepreneurs who may have never seen one before. That puts them at a disadvantage against the investor. Across Europe, the picture is even more confusing. What we needed was a sort of Rosetta Stone term sheet. So today a group of 15 early European stage investors have decided, under the SeedSummit umbrella group, to standardise on two "reader-friendly" term sheet templates. One is being dubbed the SeedSummit Term Sheet and the other an Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) friendly variant, tailored for the UK market. See here. This is the first time European investors have co-operated in this way, on this scale. SeedSummit, a 50+ group which convened first in 2009, hopes that the benefits to startups will include reducing the time it takes to get deals done, reducing legal costs and greater transparency. They were inspired, they say, by the Series Seed docs of the USA. The participants in the initiative consist of some of the leading early stage and Seed investors in Europe:

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