Ask HN: How do we find an investor in the EU/UK for something very technical?

Some history:

We have spent a large portion of our daily company time developing something like Apportable for apps, not games. We tried Apportable on multiple occasions and it's too game focused. Our clients all want Android apps but basically don't want to pay for them or spend time on them, for them, iOS is the first class citizen, Android comes far behind that and the rest is usually not even mentioned. Especially line of business apps are very much like: make the iOS perfect and 'the rest' (as much as you can do fast/cheap) should be done, but don't bother us with it.

Status:

We compile the iOS apps we build to Android and release them; we currently also have alpha versions for WP8 & HTML5 which work well enough. But we need to do it (just like Apportable by the way) currently; we 'fix' our library when there are methods / classes missing. We allow, in quite intuitive ways, to use the native API's where clients want/need to.

Future:

We would like to finish this so it can be sold online, maybe as a service or download; currently it's sold together with every project we build and that works well but the money from that is not enough to 'finish' this into a product. To finish that entire phase and start selling worldwide (instead of project based, which, by the way, is still a lot cheaper than doing an Android implementation yourself) we need more money then we can fund ourselves. We are situated in Europe and the investors (mostly angels) we speak to either have no clue what this is or how much upside it has or offer far too small amounts for too much % (usually actually less money than we can make ourselves selling it in a month or two which is just not enough to invest in it).

What would be a good route for us to finding the right people? It does not have to be in the EU/UK, but that seems the most likely option.

I guess the best answer here is to talk to people. But if you truly know no wealthy people in technology, that might be hard. Wealthy people usually have wealthy friends, and they tend to invest together (risk spreading).

Pure technical products are usually harder to find investors for, but regardless, you should focus on results/value. If getting an average app developed costs you $20k on iOS, and $20k on Android, then show investors that by using your technology, the second $20k for the Android app can be saved. Don't talk about technical stuff, such as classes/methods/blabla. They won't care, unless they're a software guy themselves.

A question: How does the user experience of these apps feel, in comparison to a native Android app? I can see this idea working perfectly for games, but for apps?

Do you have any sample apps?

What do you need the money for?

Honestly, I ended up moving to the US. Depending on what exactly you want a good option may well be to spend 3-4 months in an accelerator in North East US or SV and then take a view on the long term. A lot depends on where you see the market. This route will expose you to the eco-systems and give you a good sense of if you want to stay the course in the US and seek venture funds.

Check out Cambridge, UK and network with the companies/investors there. ARM, Bromium, Geometrics and quite a few others are all companies that are based there and are very technical.

- For your kind of $20k + $20k evaluation; we can do most Android apps from iOS in a few k, so yes we have a good show case for that

- The user experience, out of the box, is just identical to iOS with a few Android-isms; one of the goals is to make it more 'Android' look & feel if we have some time (and thus money); to be very honest and i'm not sure if that's different in the US; for non-consumer facing apps it is actually better to have WP8/Android 100% the same as the iOS app as it actually annoys companies to have elaborate helpdesks who have to check what device you have and for consumer facing apps at least our clients generally (and there are some very large ones there) really have no interest in the look & feel of the Android app. They present the iOS app to the board / investors / users / etc, the Android app is an afterthought usually. That said; it is fast (native), it looks good, you can specialise graphics / animations and even specific views to be more native in their look & feel; this does not take long to get it feeling solid

- Example apps; Yes, we can/have show(n) enough

- Using the money; mostly for completing our roadmap which is for 2015; we have 2 roadmaps; for internal and external. The internal roadmap is for when we just go along as we are which is ok but a real shame from my perspective; I think many people/companies would benefit here. And of course if we wait to do this organically we stand the chance of being too slow. My preference would be to do the external roadmap which is focused on making this a sellable toolkit / service. While selling it to clients at the same time (again, I believe what Apportable was/is doing).

Not to mention ; it is not too hard to get games running as well; they are done partly but not running fast enough as we don't do many games so not much need to optimise.