What is a B2C investor?
A B2C investor backs companies that sell to people instead of to other businesses. Think consumer apps, direct-to-consumer brands, marketplaces, subscriptions and consumer fintech. If your customer pays with their own card and not a company budget, you're building a B2C startup.
In Angel Match, B2C is one of the market tags on an investor's profile. It's a smaller group than you might expect. The B2B investor list has 58,000+ people on it, which is more than three times the size of this one. So if raising for a consumer startup feels harder than it looks for your B2B founder friends, part of the reason is simple math. There are fewer people to ask.
One thing to know before you start: plenty of consumer investors don't carry the B2C tag at all. They're filed by category instead. The consumer internet tag alone covers 43,000+ investors, more than twice as many as B2C. So widen your search to consumer internet, e-commerce and consumer goods investors too. You'll find people there who'd happily back a consumer startup but won't show up on this list.
Who's on the B2C investor list?
Mostly angels. Roughly seven in ten investors on this list are angel investors, and only a little over a third are venture capitalists. Some people carry both tags, which is why those two shares overlap. Put simply, angels outnumber venture capitalists almost two to one here.
That's not how every market looks. On the B2B list, angels and venture capitalists show up in almost equal numbers. Consumer is different, and it's easy to see why. An angel can download your app or try your product and form an opinion in an afternoon. They don't need a technical deep dive to know if they'd use it themselves.
For you, that changes how the round comes together. Angel investors write checks between $25,000 and $500,000, so a consumer seed round often gets built from a lot of smaller checks instead of one big one. Plan for more conversations and more follow-ups than a founder raising from two or three funds would need. Venture capitalists write bigger checks, from $2 million to $100 million or more, but there are far fewer of them on this list and they'll want to see more proof first.
Where are B2C investors based?
More than half of the B2C investors in Angel Match are in the United States. California is the biggest state by a wide margin, with about twice as many as New York. But zoom in to cities and the picture changes. San Francisco and New York City are nearly tied at the top.
Los Angeles is the one to notice. It ranks fourth on this list, ahead of Boston. On the B2B list it's the other way around, with Boston ahead of Los Angeles. If you're building a brand, a creator product or anything close to entertainment, LA investors deserve a spot on your list.
Outside the US, the United Kingdom comes second, and most of its B2C investors are in London. India is third, ahead of Germany, France and Canada. Bengaluru and Mumbai both make the top ten cities here, and neither one makes the top ten on the B2B list. If you sell to consumers in India, that's a real pool of local investors. If you don't, filter by country first so your list matches your market.
B2C funding by stage: deep at seed, thin at Series A
Seed is the most common stage on this list, followed by early stage venture and pre-seed. Pre-seed alone has 1,500+ investors, so you have options even before you have revenue. After seed the numbers drop fast. Seed investors outnumber Series A investors about six to one here. On the B2B list it's closer to four to one.
Outside data tells the same story. Carta looked at consumer startups on its platform that closed a Series A in the first quarter of 2025. The median gap between their seed round and their Series A was three full years, up from 1.7 years a year earlier. Seed valuations ran lower too. The median consumer seed valuation on Carta was $13.6 million that quarter, compared with $16 million across all sectors.
So raise your seed round as if the next one is a long way off, because it probably is. Before you set a target, work out how many months that money really buys with a runway calculator. And start meeting Series A investors early. The pool is small, and you don't want your first conversation with them to be the one where you ask for money.
What do B2C investors look for?
Consumer investors have seen plenty of apps with big download numbers and nobody using them a month later. So they look past top-line growth and ask what happens after someone signs up or buys once. An early-stage consumer investor quoted in that same Carta report said investors now care more about whether each sale makes money than about brand alone, and that they want to see traction sooner than they used to.
What counts as traction depends on what you sell:
- Consumer apps: retention by cohort. Show how many users from each month are still active 30, 60 and 90 days later.
- Consumer brands: repeat purchase rate, plus your margin after shipping and returns.
- Marketplaces: how often buyers come back, and whether supply is growing without you paying for all of it.
- Subscriptions: monthly churn, and how long it takes a subscriber to pay back what you spent to get them.
Across all four, expect questions about what a customer costs you and where they come from. Break your customer acquisition cost out by channel, and be honest about how much of your growth is paid. A founder who can say "nearly half of our new customers come from word of mouth" has a much easier pitch than one whose growth stops when the ads do.
How to approach B2C investors
Lead with the product. This is the big advantage you have over a B2B founder: the person reading your email can become your customer in the next five minutes. Put a link to the app or the store in the first two lines. If you make something physical, offer to send it.
Then match the ask to the person. Most of this list is angels, so if you're raising under $2 million, you're in the right place. Name a check size in your email that one person can say yes to. If you're raising more, focus on the venture capitalists on the list and lead with your retention and payback numbers, since that's what they'll check first.
Pick people who've backed your kind of business before. B2C covers everything from a mobile game to a snack brand, and an angel who loves one may have no interest in the other. Look at each investor's other market tags and past investments before you write, and mention the overlap in your first line. It shows you did the homework, which is half the battle.
The B2C list is deepest right where most consumer rounds start: angels writing seed checks in San Francisco, New York City, London and Los Angeles. Start there, then widen to the consumer internet and e-commerce tags once you've worked through it. When you're ready to write to them, the investor outreach email generator will give you a first draft to edit.
Consumer software investors
