WHEN John Waddell is told it is almost 10 years since he took over managing Archangel, Scotland's foremost angel investor and unrivalled in the UK, he looks surprised.

"I feel as if I have just started, there is always something to do here, which is exciting."

That excitement began in 1992 when pioneers Barry Sealey and Mike Rutterford created what is said to be the oldest angel group in the world, evolving into a syndicate with a professional gatekeeper. It has so far pumped £80m of the personal wealth of dozens of successful Scottish entrepreneurs into the start-ups of 70 new Scottish entrepreneurs, leveraging a further £100m from the public and private sectors.

Mr Waddell says: "I have bought into the kind of philosophy here which is a group of like-minded individuals who want to give something back to Scotland and want to work with young companies." They also want to make their hard-earned entrepreneurial cash work, but no disclosures are made on the syndicate's returns. The gatekeeper's only clue is: "The most enthusiastic investors are the ones who have been doing it the longest."

In the past two years alone Archangel's members have raised almost £11m and leveraged a further £9m for early stage Scottish companies with technology which could have a global demand. The group helped 12 of its existing portfolio drum up £10m in follow-on funding last year, while this year a record £12m was raised in the first half alone.

But the angels' share does not guarantee success, Mr Waddell notes. "In the nine years I have been here we have invested in 79 businesses, probably 35 of them have gone bust. That looks like a high average, but in terms of amounts lost it is less than 20 per cent."

He added: "We do have a lot of fun here, we do far more than just investing, we are not just sitting here writing cheques and waiting for reports then hassling people for exits. We work very hard to try to create value in these businesses for the benefit of everybody involved in them."

John Waddell's career moment came one day when, as a junior solicitor in an Edinburgh firm now disappeared, he watched a restorer come in to re-cover his old Victorian desk. "I was sitting back waiting till he had finished, and I decided I had to do something else. Despite the fact I had no relevant experience I got the job of assistant company secretary at Christian Salvesen, and worked there for 12 years."

As company secretary, then director of legal services, at the Venerable Salvesen, Mr Waddell was at the heart of a deal-making era which saw the sale of its US business, the demerger of Aggreko, and ultimately the firm's disappearance from Edinburgh in 1998. "I was involved in shareholder revolts, I tended to run all the mergers and acquisitions, bought and sold quite a lot of companies, which is where I got the experience that was useful here."

There followed three years at Bank of Scotland ("they got reorganised about three times while I was there less than three years") and four years at Noble Grossart, but Mr Waddell was missing the strategic and transactional role he had so enjoyed in the heady 1990s. "I went to see Barry Sealey who had employed me at Salvesen and he said come and work here. Peter Shakeshaft was the director and we had numerous conversations about how I would work with him, then he said I think you are my successor."

Deeply involved in the diligence and dealmaking, the affable lawyer also has "a wide network of experts" to draw on. Unlike angel groups which merely act as facilitators to raise cash, Archangels are interested in in-depth relationships with their protégés to help them grow, and survive. Unlike a Dragons Den pitch, it is only after extensive diligence that hopefuls will pitch up before the nucleus of core investors led by Mr Rutterford. The angelic but no doubt unnerving panel may include Eric Young (like Mr Rutterford a property industry entrepreneur), former Cala chief Geoff Ball, former Baillie Gifford senior partner Gavin Gemmell, leading fund manager Stuart Paul, and Alastair Salvesen, said to be Scotland's third richest man with a £1.3billion fortune.

Over the years the act has been sharpened up, the lawyer says: "We have got better at doing diligence, we have more people, we spend more time thinking about what Mike Rutterford calls 'bleeding edge investment'. We do invest in things where you don't quite know what is going to happen necessarily, but you know there is something in it."

The year after Mr Waddell's arrival saw the flotation of Optos, the syndicate's first ever investment, sparked by "a drawing on the back of an A4 sheet of paper", he says, "And one of the best in terms of price and exit". Current stars in the portfolio include MGB Biopharma and Touch Bionics, while sales have been limited to Lab 901 in 2011, Vitrology in 2012 and Flexitricity this year. Exits have been harder to find since the crash, the lawyer admits, and in the aftermath "nobody phoned you". But he says those milestone sales indicate that "trade buyers who have been accumulating vast amounts of cash since the crash are starting to come out of the box and do things".

What's more, the office is currently "extraordinarily busy", though possibly not with new investments ("we haven't done a deal for just over a year") but with calls for follow-on fundraisings. "The thing about these businesses is they always need more money than you expect and you have to be ready for follow-ons because life doesn't always turn out the way you expect, particularly from a standing start."

A study published this month by Glasgow University's Adam Smith Business School estimated there are now 100 angel groups in the UK, plugging a vital investment gap which has been left by traditional, more risk-averse, venture capital.

Mr Waddell says: "Unlike some group we have stuck very strongly to what we set out to do, which is work with new businesses, with entrepreneurs." They also work closely with the Scottish Coinvestment Fund and Scottish Investment Bank. As the lawyer who wanted a new challenge puts it: "We do believe we are adding to the economy."