We back founders who want to make life-changing wealth — faster and with more certainty than the venture path offers. Let's build something profitable, well-paying, and genuinely worth being proud of.
The investors behind Proper Business are people who have already made meaningful wealth — and decided it was enough. They're not looking for more. They're looking to help others get there too. And you don't have to be a mission-driven company or a social enterprise to qualify. You just have to want to build something that isn't extractive — a business that provides a great customer experience, pays its people fairly, and makes its founder(s) wealthy.
Which means when you take this money, you're not taking it from someone who needs you to be a unicorn. You're taking it from someone who knows what financial freedom feels like and thinks you deserve to get there. The terms are structured to make that actually likely — not a lottery. See our funding page for the full detail.
In exchange, we ask you to embed a simple set of commitments into your company's articles from day one. We call them the Proper Business provisions — and importantly, they apply to all shareholders equally, including us.
The provisions are straightforward. They sit in your articles and apply to all shareholders equally — including us. Template language for your articles is available on our provisions page.
The caps are set by you, not us. We have views on sensible ranges — see the funding page — but we want founders to own this, not feel it was imposed on them.
It suits founders who want to make genuinely life-changing, retirement-grade wealth — the kind you can live off passively for the rest of your life — and for whom certainty and control matter more than ceiling. The venture path suits some founders well, particularly those going after very large markets where scale is everything. This model suits founders for whom a reliable, meaningful outcome beats a less certain, potentially larger one.
It suits founders who can get to paying customers quickly, who aren't chasing a vision that requires infinite capital before it works, and who find the idea of a personal wealth cap liberating rather than limiting.
If your honest goal is to make £150m personally, we are not the right investor. We mean that kindly — that goal is legitimate, but it belongs with a different kind of fund. If your goal is to build something excellent, pay your people well, and walk away wealthy enough to never worry again — with some surplus going to the world beyond your company — then we should talk.
We are investors who have made meaningful wealth and decided it was enough. We believe the world is better served by a thousand thriving, profitable small businesses than by a handful of unicorns. What we want is to increase the odds that capable founders reach genuine financial independence — through the structure of the deal rather than through luck or timing.
More wealth, more evenly distributed, created by businesses that are actually good to work in. That feels like a worthwhile thing to spend capital on.